Today, I wanted to mess around with a comic series that I’ve been really into lately, “Vengeance of the Moon Knight.” I always thought it would be cool to see how many issues are there and maybe get a quick rundown of each one. So, I decided to get my hands dirty and build a little something to do just that.
First off, I started looking for data. I mean, where else do you go? So, I started searching for a good database or list online that had all the info on “Vengeance of the Moon Knight” issues. After a bit of digging, I finally found a website that looked promising. It had a pretty comprehensive list of all the issues, along with some extra details like release dates and summaries. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a good starting point.
Next, I needed to get this data into a format I could actually work with. The website had all the issues listed out, but it wasn’t exactly in a structured way. So, I used this tool called Beautiful Soup in Python. It’s pretty handy for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. I wrote a small script to go through the website’s code, find the relevant bits about each issue, and pull out the title, release date, and summary. It took a bit of trial and error to get the selectors right, but eventually, I had a nice, clean list of all the issues.
Once I had the data extracted, I wanted to store it in a way that was easy to access and manage. I decided to go with a simple JSON file. JSON is great because it’s human-readable and easy to work with in Python. I wrote another script to take the list of issues I had extracted and dump it into a JSON file. Each issue was represented as a dictionary with keys for the title, release date, and summary.
Here’s a peek at what the JSON looked like:
- “title”: “Vengeance of the Moon Knight #1”,
- “release_date”: “September 2, 2009”,
- “summary”: “Moon Knight returns to New York City…”
- “title”: “Vengeance of the Moon Knight #2”,
- “release_date”: “October 7, 2009”,
- “summary”: “The aftermath of issue #1 with the introduction of a new threat…”
With the data all nicely stored, I could finally start playing around with it. I wrote a few more Python scripts to do things like list all the issues, search for issues by title or release date, and even display a random issue’s summary. It was pretty cool to see it all come together.
Now, when I need a quick recap of an issue or just want to browse through the series, I have my own little tool to do it. I might even add more features in the future, like maybe pulling in cover images or linking to a place where you can read the comics online.
What I Learned
This whole thing was a fun little project, and I learned a few things along the way. First, scraping data from websites can be a bit tricky. You really have to understand the structure of the HTML to get what you want. Second, having data in a structured format like JSON makes it so much easier to work with. And finally, Python is just awesome for these kinds of tasks. With a few libraries and some basic scripting, you can do some pretty powerful stuff.
This was a simple project, but it was a great way to combine my love for comics with a bit of coding. Plus, now I have a handy tool that I can use whenever I want to dive back into the world of “Vengeance of the Moon Knight.”