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YAML, SQL, or something else? Looking for recommendations for making a database of stories. (lemm.ee)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Short version of the situation is that I have an old site I frequent for user written stories. The site is ancient (think early 2000's), and has terrible tools for sorting and searching the stories. Half of the time, stories disappear from author profiles. Thousands of stories and you can only sort by top, new, and 30-day top.

I'm in the process of programming a scraper tool so I can archive the stories and give myself a library to better find forgotten stories on the site. I'll be storing tags, dates, authors, etc, as well as the full body of the text.

Concerning the data, there are a few thousand stories- ascii only, and various data points for each story with the body of many stores reaching several pages long.

Currently, I'm using Python to compile the data and would like to know what storage solution is ideal for my situation. I have a little familiarity with SQL, json, and yaml, but not enough to know what might be best. I am also open to any other solutions that work well with Python.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago (11 children)

I would scrape them into individual json files with more info than you think you need, just for the sake of simplicity. Once you have them all, then you can work out an ideal storage solution, probably some kind of SQL DB. Once that is done, you could turn the json files into a .tar.zst and archive it, or just delete them if you are confident in processed representation.

Source: I completed a similar but much larger story site archive and found this to be the easiest way.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (10 children)

That's a good idea! Would yaml be alright for this too? I like the readability and Python styled syntax compared to json.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Yup, I think it'd work fine, especially if you want the ability to easily inspect individual items.

Any of the popular python yaml libraries will be more than sufficient. With a bit of work, you can marshal the input (when reading files back) into python (data)classes, making it easy to work with.

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