Jeopardy parser

Quick note: this project does not use semantic versioning (python parser.py --version outputs the last updated date of the script).

What is this?

This is a Python script to extract Jeopardy! clues from the J! Archive website and dump them into a SQLite database for use elsewhere (no particular application is intended). Python 2.7.* and SQLite 3.7.* on *nix have been tested and confirmed to work (requires BeautifulSoup 4 and the lxml parser).

Quick start

git clone git://github.com/whymarrh/jeopardy-parser.git
cd jeopardy-parser
pip install -r requirements.txt
python download.py
python parser.py

How long will all this take?

There are two important steps:

Downloading the game files from the J! Archive website
Parsing and inserting them into the database

The first step, downloading, will depend on the machine: the download script will use twice the number of available cores to download game files in parallel and will take around an hour to complete. The second step, parsing, should take ~30 minutes (on a 1.7 GHz Core i5 w/ 4 GB RAM). In total, you're looking at around 2 hours (probably less).

The complete download of the game files is ~350MB, and the resulting database file is ~50MB (although these numbers are qucikly outdated as the number of games increases).

Querying the database

The database is split into 5 tables:

Table name	What it holds
`airdates`	Airdates for the shows, indexed by game number
`documents`	Mappings from clue IDs to clue text and answers
`categories`	The categories
`clues`	Clue IDs with metadata (game number, round, and value)
`classifications`	Mappings from clue IDs to category IDs

To get all the clues along with their metadata:

SELECT clues.id, game, round, value, clue, answer
FROM clues
JOIN documents ON clues.id = documents.id
-- WHERE <expression>
;

To get the category that a clue is in, given a clue id:

SELECT clue_id, category
FROM classifications
JOIN categories ON category_id = categories.id
-- WHERE <expression>
;

To get everything (although it is better to pick and choose what you're looking for):

SELECT clues.id, clues.game, airdate, round, value, category, clue, answer
FROM clues
JOIN airdates ON clues.game = airdates.game
JOIN documents ON clues.id = documents.id
JOIN classifications ON clues.id = classifications.clue_id
JOIN categories ON classifications.category_id = categories.id
-- WHERE <expression>
;

License