My Yahoo! Pipe to scrape swimming pool opening times

For a while I’ve been mucking around with swimming pool opening times on the leisure.birmingham.gov.uk site. They’re all in different formats and very difficult to negotiate – even harder to make sense of.

So I’ve had a go at making them easier to read. If you look at the picture above, you’ll see what I mean. Complicated, eh? More complicated than it probably should be. I’ve tried to use regular expressions to tidy up the information, scrape out HTML code and generally get it into some shape. That’s because the information on the leisure.birmingham.gov.uk website needs a lot of mucking around. It’s in lots of different fields and each page is quite different.

Web page for Erdington Pool

Of course, if I knew what I was doing it would be a lot better, neater, simpler.

Why did I bother? Well, I’m interested in seeing how this data could be presented in a simpler, more defined way – and at some point being used to help people. I’ve already started to put the new Yahoo! Pipes badges on static pages, here.

You can now grab my pipe (which really is scraping opening times) and embed it on your website, if you want. Like this:
{“pipe_id”:”cb8356d7d4839b49fd6dbc5b027d412c”,”_btype”:”list”}