Quote Guessing Game using Web Scraping in Python

Prerequisite: BeautifulSoup Installation

In this article, we will scrape a quote and details of the author from this site http//quotes.toscrape.com using python framework called BeautifulSoup and develop a guessing game using different data structures and algorithm.

The user will be given 4 chances to guess the author of a famous quote, In every chance the user will be provided with a hint which can be the author’s birth date, first name’s first letter, second name’s first letter, etc. On successfully guessing the author, a message is printed and if the user fails to guess the answer even after all the 4 chances then again a message is printed along with the answer.

Approach

• Import module
  • requests help us grab the page, when the response is received it is stored in the form of a string
  • bs4 library is used to create beasutifulSoup object.
  • csv library helps reading and writing CSV files using python
  • sleep function from time module helps add delay in the execution of the program.
  • choice function from random module returns a random element.
• Create a list to store values scraped
• Scrape the details from this link: http//quotes.toscrape.com
• Extract data
• Game logic
  • Return random items from the dictionary created
  • Set number of guesses
  • Write message for success and failure
  • Keep giving hints until either number of chances reach zero or the user gets it right

Program:

Python3

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from csv import writer
from time import sleep
from random import choice

# list to store scraped data
all_quotes = []

# this part of the url is constant
base_url = "http://quotes.toscrape.com/"

# this part of the url will keep changing
url = "/page/1"

while url:

    # concatenating both urls
    # making request
    res = requests.get(f"{base_url}{url}")
    print(f"Now Scraping{base_url}{url}")
    soup = BeautifulSoup(res.text, "html.parser")

    # extracting all elements
    quotes = soup.find_all(class_="quote")

    for quote in quotes:
        all_quotes.append({
            "text": quote.find(class_="text").get_text(),
            "author": quote.find(class_="author").get_text(),
            "bio-link": quote.find("a")["href"]
        })
    next_btn = soup.find(_class="next")
    url = next_btn.find("a")["href"] if next_btn else None
    sleep(2)

quote = choice(all_quotes)
remaining_guesses = 4
print("Here's a quote:  ")
print(quote["text"])

guess = ''
while guess.lower() != quote["author"].lower() and remaining_guesses > 0:
    guess = input(
        f"Who said this quote? Guesses remaining {remaining_guesses}")

    if guess == quote["author"]:
        print("CONGRATULATIONS!!! YOU GOT IT RIGHT")
        break
    remaining_guesses -= 1

    if remaining_guesses == 3:
        res = requests.get(f"{base_url}{quote['bio-link']}")
        soup = BeautifulSoup(res.text, "html.parser")
        birth_date = soup.find(class_="author-born-date").get_text()
        birth_place = soup.find(class_="author-born-location").get_text()
        print(
            f"Here's a hint: The author was born on {birth_date}{birth_place}")

    elif remaining_guesses == 2:
        print(
            f"Here's a hint: The author's first name starts with: {quote['author'][0]}")

    elif remaining_guesses == 1:
        last_initial = quote["author"].split(" ")[1][0]
        print(
            f"Here's a hint: The author's last name starts with: {last_initial}")

    else:
        print(
            f"Sorry, you ran out of guesses. The answer was {quote['author']}")

Output: