London Marathon Scraper

A quick and dirty collection (no real error handling, no tests) of Go programs to scrape, sanitise and consolidate anonymous london marathon results and output in CSV format for analysis. The project only pulls down the mass start results, for men-only, and only back to 2014. Although other result pages back to 2010 are accessible by directly manipulating the URL, the results format does not contain the clubs - I was only really interested in using the results to find out top scottish club times over the years, so didn't include these.

Data

After running, data/processed/results.csv and data/processed/clubs.csv contain the 2014-2019 mass start results.

Results - data/processed/results.csv and data/raw/race/race-n.csv

Col Number	Description
1	Race name
2	Club name
3	Race number
4	Age category string
4	Halfway time in seconds
5	Finish time in seconds

Raw Clubs - data/raw/clubs.csv

See step 3 in Usage below

Col Number	Description
1	Club - club name as it was in the results
2	Country - always set to "other" for new entries
3	CanonicalClub - what the name of the club is meant to be
4	Ignore - if true, will not be present in final results
5	Processed - Set to true for new entries when updating to identify records that must be changed. Should be false to updated records.

Canonical Clubs - data/raw/clubs.csv

Col Number	Description
1	Club - canonical club name
2	Country - club country

Usage

To generate the data:

1. Run /cmd/scraper/main.go to pull down data for the year or years you want.
2. Run /cmd/clubs/main.go to create /data/raw/clubs.csv
3. Manually edit /data/raw/clubs.csv - this is the big thing! Club entry is free form, and no two people seem to spell their club in the same way or in the same form. This file must be manually edited to first exclude any clubs that are nonsense (like "not attached") by setting Ignore to true, then to update the CanonicalClub column for every misspelled club to point to the actual club name in the same file. You can also update the club country at the same time. Once the club is updated, the Processed flag should set to true.
4. Run /cmd/clubs/process.go to generate data/processed/results.csv and data/processed/clubs.csv. The consolidated results will have their clubs "fixed" according to /data/raw/clubs.csv.
5. Do whatever you want to do with the CSVs.