fideparser

fideparser is a script to parse FIDE Ratings website and export the data of the rated tournaments.

FIDE (Federation International des Echecs or World Chess Federation) is the internationally recognised governing body of chess. Every month a lot of tournaments are played all over the world and many of them are rated for the FIDE Rating List which is published on 1st day of each month.

FIDE publishes all the rating reports of those rated chess tournaments online at http://ratings.fide.com but they don't provide any API or automatized way of exporting or getting that information.

So this script allows you to export all the data of those tournaments (based on country and rating period) to CSV, JSON and an internal pickle-based format. This script doesn't export the player data from each tournament, but the metadata about the tournament: name, start- and end-dates, format, player number, arbiter and organizer name, ...

This scripts relies on screen-scrapping so if FIDE changes the HTML the script will break :S

I intend to mantain this script at least once a year to export data of the previous year, so I will keep an eye on the FIDE site and try to fix the bugs.

Feel free to fork and ask for pull-requests. If you find any issue, use the issue tracker in GitHub.

Dependencies

This script depends on BeautifulSoup4 an excelent HTML parser used, among other things, for doing screen-scrapping tasks. The scripts pulls the correct version of BeautifulSoup4 so there's no need to do anything on your side to install it.

Installation

Install using pip:

$ pip install fideparser

And to upgrade to a newer version, just use pip again:

$ pip install --upgrade fideparser

Use

All options are explained in the help, that you can get running this:

$ export_fide_tournaments -h

Examples

Export all data from spanish tournaments rated on January 2013 in csv format:

$ export_fide_tournaments ESP 2013-01-01 2013-january-spain.csv csv

Export all data from french tournaments rated on July 2013 in binary format:

$ export_fide_tournaments FRA 2012-07-01 2012-july.binary binary

Use the previously exported binary file from France, to create a JSON file:

$ export_fide_tournaments FRA 2012-07-01 2012-july.json json --datafile 2012-july.binary

Use the previously exported binary file from France, to create a csv file:

$ export_fide_tournaments FRA 2012-07-01 2012-july.csv csv --datafile 2012-july.binary

If you want to export more arbiter data, append the optional flag `--arbiter-data`:

$ export_fide_tournaments ESP 2013-01-01 2013-january-spain.csv csv --arbiter-data

If you want to export the report data (currently only the number of players present in the tournament report), append the optional flag `--report-data`:

$ export_fide_tournaments ESP 2013-01-01 2013-january-spain.csv csv --report-data

A script for merging CSV files is also provided, usefull to merge files generated by export_fide_tournaments script. It can be used as follows:

$ merge_csv_files outfile.csv 2013-january-spain.csv 2012-july.csv

Author

Mikel Larreategi <larreategi@eibar.org>

FIDE International Arbiter and python developer