IPL Match Notifications using Python

So finally after a gruesome wait, IPL is finally gonna start in few hours. In this post, we’ll see how we can create a Python script which notifies us about the time remaining in a match to start or a match is already started.

In this script, we’ll scrape espncricinfo.com to fetch match data.

Note: This code works for Mac. In order to make it work on Windows, you’ll need to modify the notify function and use win32con python package to write code for Windows notification.

Script:

def match_status():
    from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
    import requests
    import datetime
    import sys
    
    baseurl='https://www.espncricinfo.com/'
    result = requests.get(baseurl)
    soup=BeautifulSoup(result.text,'lxml')
    match_today=False
    
    for link in soup.findAll('a', href=True):
        if 'indian-premier-league' in str(link['href']):
            matchurl=link['href']
            match_today=True
            break
    if match_today==False:
        return "No match today"
        sys.exit(0)
	
    result = requests.get(baseurl+matchurl)
    soup=BeautifulSoup(result.text,'lxml')
	
    team1=soup.findAll("div", { "class" : "team-col" })[0].text.strip()
    team2=soup.findAll("div", { "class" : "team-col" })[2].text.strip()
	
    try:
        match_start_time=soup.find("div", { "class" : "status-label" }).text.strip()
        match_start_time=datetime.datetime.strptime(match_start_time.replace(',',''), '%d-%b-%Y %I:%M %p')
        time_remaining=match_start_time-datetime.datetime.utcnow()
        return "Match between "+team1+" and "+team2+" will start in "+str(time_remaining)+" hours"
    except:
        return "Match between "+team1+" and "+team2+" is in progress"
	
def notify(title, text):
    import os
    os.system("""osascript -e 'display notification "{}" with title "{}"'""".format(text, title))

	
def main():
    status=match_status()
    notify("IPL match notification", status)	
	
if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Save it as ipl_match_notification.py. Test it by executing python3 ipl_match_notification.py and you’ll see the notification about MI vs CSK match.

Now you can set up a cron for this and never miss a match because of work :)