For the first challenge of dashboard week, the task was to web-scrape regional budget holiday data from a travel website, clean the data up and visualise it in a program of choice.
Extracting the data:
This proved to be the main challenge of the day, having become used to using documentation and API's, returning to webscraping was not an easy task. Once the correct link had been identified, it was time to attempt RegEx. Using both VisualStudioCode, and regex101.com I tried to construct the regex expression required in order to obtain the data needed.
As you can see I was able to outline the key information I required, however, the expression constructed was far too specific and relied on each section to have the same construct, so the expression was reduced down and changed to focus mainly on the separators for each key line, <li>
Once the correct expression was created the rest of the challenge was mainly on correctly extracting the necessary information from the download.
As the data extraction and cleaning took up a lot of time I quickly created the main components for my dashboard which would allow users to gain an overview of their potential budget holiday destinations, regarding party size, stay and location.
Though not quite complete, in terms of data and visuals, the dashboard functions as I wanted and needs a few tweaks to get it to where I want it to be. In future I'll work on adding to the current alteryx flow and polishing off the visual side of the dashboard.
That is day 1 of dashboard week, this proved to be an insightful challenge having to relearn webscraping and regex. Looking forward to what I'll learn in the days to come!