How to query from an online database in Google Apps Scripts?

Question

I am trying to use google apps scripts and google sheets to basically automatically update a google sheet with statistical information every time an NHL team plays. How do I query nhl.com online database within the Google Apps Scripts environment? For example -- a stat that I am interested in is total points for a certain team. How would I get that integer value from nhl.com in Google Apps Scripts?

Answer 1

You need to use UrlFetchApp that is the GAS's service to send http requests and accept responses.

Your code might look something like:

 function getMatchResults() {
    var options = {
        'method': 'get',
        //and any other additional parameters you might need
    };
    var url = 'http://www.nhl.com/stats/team?aggregate=0&gameType=2&report=teamsummary&teamId=24&reportType=season&seasonFrom=20172018&seasonTo=20172018&filter=gamesPlayed,gte,1&sort=points%22'
    var results = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url, options); 
    Logger.log(results);
    var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet();
    //further on goes your code to actually save the results into your sheet
}

If you need this function to run periodically, you'll need to set up a time driven trigger which is described here .

UPDATE: After your comment, there goes the second part. At first, I assumed that nhl.com has some kind of API that would return responses in JSON format but turns it does not. This is why you were getting the error at JSON.parse — the returned result is not a JSON object but an HTML web page.

So your task gets trickier: you try scraping the page and get the results out of html or use third party APIs like MySportFeeds . You can also see this Quora discussion .

If you use MySportFeeds, which seems to be free for personal use, the above function will probably look something like:

function getMatchResults() {
  var headers = {
    'Authorization': 'username:password',
  };
  var options = {
    'method': 'get',
    'headers': headers,
    //and any other additional parameters you might need
  };
  var url = 'https://www.mysportsfeeds.com/api/feed/pull/nfl/2016-2017-regular/scoreboard.json?fordate=20161211'
  var results = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url, options); 
  Logger.log(results);
  var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet();
  //further on goes your code to actually save the results into your sheet
}

UPDATE #2:

As per one more comment :) You have 3 options actually:

• scrape the whole page (see wikipedia article about that and here )
• use some third party API (MySportFeeds above)
• look into page source and find where it loads its data from — see this answer for more detail.

Using the last option, the code look like:

function getMatchResults() {
  var headers = {
    "Origin": "http://http://www.nhl.com/"
  };
  var options = {
    'method': 'get',
    //and any other additional parameters you might need
  };
  var baseUrl = 'http://www.nhl.com/stats/rest/individual/team/basic/game/teamsummary'
  var urlParameters = '?cayenneExp=teamId=23';
  var url = baseUrl + urlParameters;
  var results = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url, options); 
  Logger.log(results);
  var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet();
  //further on goes your code to actually save the results into your sheet
}

You can see here that stats are returned by http://www.nhl.com/stats/rest/individual/team/basic/game/teamsummary?cayenneExp= and in the cayenneExp parameter you should specify you additional settings (like teamId=23 which is Vancouver in the example). This is how it looks in devtools: http://take.ms/fSH7H