Live Google Spreadsheet For Keeping Track Of Sochi Medals

The “medals” R post by TRInker and re-blogged by Revolutions were both spiffy and a live example why there’s no point in not publishing raw data.

You don’t need to have R (or any other language) do the scraping, though. The “IMPORTHTML” function (yes, function names seem to be ALL CAPS now over at Google Drive) in Google Drive Spreadsheets can easily do the scraping with just s simple:

=IMPORTHTML("http://www.sochi2014.com/en/medal-standings","table",0)

that will refresh on demand and every hour.

Here’s a live URL that will give back a CSV of the results which can easily be used in R thusly:

library(RCurl)

sochi.medals.URL = "https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Al7I7nS0BP50IfThs55OKv5UPI9u-ctZgZRyDQma_G8/export?format=csv&gid=0"
medals <- read.csv(textConnection(getURL(sochi.medals.URL)), 
                   stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

str(medals)

'data.frame':  89 obs. of  6 variables:
$ Rank   : chr  "1" "2" "3" "4" ...
$ Country: chr  "Norway" "Canada" "Netherlands" "United States" ...
$ Gold   : int  4 4 3 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 ...
$ Silver : int  3 3 2 1 0 3 2 0 0 0 ...
$ Bronze : int  4 2 3 3 0 3 0 1 0 0 ...
$ Total  : int  11 9 8 6 2 7 3 2 1 1 ...

print(medals)

   Rank                                   Country Gold Silver Bronze Total
1     1                                    Norway    4      3      4    11
2     2                                    Canada    4      3      2     9
3     3                               Netherlands    3      2      3     8
4     4                             United States    2      1      3     6
5     5                                   Germany    2      0      0     2
6     6                              Russian Fed.    1      3      3     7
7     7                                   Austria    1      2      0     3
8     8                                    France    1      0      1     2
9    =9                                   Belarus    1      0      0     1
10   =9                                     Korea    1      0      0     1
11   =9                                    Poland    1      0      0     1
12   =9                                  Slovakia    1      0      0     1
13   =9                               Switzerland    1      0      0     1
14   14                                    Sweden    0      3      1     4
15   15                            Czech Republic    0      2      1     3
16   16                                  Slovenia    0      1      2     3
17   17                                     Italy    0      1      1     2
18  =18                                     China    0      1      0     1
19  =18                                   Finland    0      1      0     1
20  =20                             Great Britain    0      0      1     1
21  =20                                   Ukraine    0      0      1     1
22    -                                   Albania    0      0      0     0
23    -                                   Andorra    0      0      0     0
24    -                                 Argentina    0      0      0     0
25    -                                   Armenia    0      0      0     0
...
87    -                             Virgin Isl, B    0      0      0     0
88    -                            Virgin Isl, US    0      0      0     0
89    -                                  Zimbabwe    0      0      0     0

Which frees you up from dealing with the scraping and lets you focus solely on the data.

You can set it up in your own Google Docs as well, just make sure to publish the spreadhseet to the web (with ‘everyone’ read permisssions), strip off the pubhtml at the end of the published URL and add export?format=csv&gid=0 in its place.