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Back Last update: 29/08/2020UCASsearch 🎓 - The story behind
For anyone not familiar with UCAS, its basically the platform through which you submit entry aplications for universities in the UK (and hold a listing of courses offered by the Unis)
So looking for a uni course? I already knew that I wanted to do something related to CS, so I started looking for possible matches
2806? Oops, yeah no thanks
The UCAS search tool does let you filter them by different parameters, like: entry requirements or university. Thats not enough for me, I wanted to see them and manipulate the data myself outside of the UCAS site.
I decided that to easily judge the course I would have to gather:
- Course name
- University
- Entry requirements
After a bit of research, I found Puppeteer, a popular libary for NodeJS which lets you scrape data from websites. Eg, UCAS search tool data into a manageable file.
After some trial and error, and many documentation queries, I came up with a short program (not good looking code) which could scrape the data off the site. It would load all of the data of each page and contuen to the next page (actually taking some time to do so)
In case you are interested, here's the repo + instructions
In conclusion...
⚠️ Under construction. (I'm probably going to send an update through my newsletter)