Jeopardy parser

What is this?

Extracts Jeopardy! clues from the J! Archive website and dumps them into a SQLite database for use elsewhere (no particular application is intended).

Python 2.7.5 and SQLite 3.7.12 are tested. Depends on BeautifulSoup 4 and the lxml parser.

Quick start

pip install beautifulsoup4
pip install lxml
git clone git://github.com/whymarrh/jeopardy-parser.git
cd jeopardy-parser
python download.py
python parser.py

Thanks to @knicholes for the Python download script.

How long will all this take?

The build script is doing two important things:

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

The first part takes ~6.5 hours, the second part should take ~20 minutes (on a 1.7 GHz Core i5 w/ 4 GB RAM). Yes, that's a rather long time -- please submit a pull request if you can think of a way to shorten it. In total, running the build script will require ~7 hours.

As an aside: the complete download of the pages is ~300MB, and the resulting database file is ~30MB.

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

This software is released under the MIT License.

autherm / jeopardy_parser_copy