Web scraper

Topics: Python Go back

When COVID vaccines were available in France in May 2021, people had to make an appointment on “doctorlib.com" to get it. But there were not enough available shots for the whole population. As soon as the appointments were added to the website, they were taken. Hundreds would disappear in minutes. To be able to make an appointment, people were checking the website constantly.

My husband needed a shot urgently. He was going to travel and be in contact with an aged relative, who had a very high risk of getting ill. When he finally found an appointment to get it, it was several weeks away. It was going to be too late. So I wrote a short script to monitor the website every minute to avoid doing it myself. It also would tell me when an earlier date for the appointment was available.

I used urrlib, jason, datetime, time and os libraries.
The script opened the website every minute, and checked the dates there.
When an earlier date was found, it sounded a beep.
It worked very well. It was for me a very important, real life issue, that I was able to solve with Python. Link to project