The aim of this project is to create a way to easily pull down a single Billboard chart for a given week so that data can be analyzed. Specifically, I want to be able to knew what position a song or album is on a chart for a specific date. The intent is to create a graph displaying all of the songs that hit number one throughout the year 2017 and what other weeks they were on the chart and at what positions.
Billboard does not have an active API as far as I can tell. The best bet seems to be to parse the HTML on the Hot 100 page to get information about each song. To do this, I will use the Requests Python library to download the HTML for a given week by visiting the url https://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100/YYYY-MM-DD where YYYY-MM-DD is the date of the week for that chart. Then, I will parse the HTML for <Article> tags with class=chart-row-X where X is a row number representing the song's location in the chart. From this tag, I will be able to parse out information about the song and store it in a data structure.