Inspiration
With the COVID-19 virus, safety is a huge issue when traveling. Travelers should be completely informed about how the country is performing when traveling to new areas, especially when traveling internationally.
What it does
Our program is a Discord bot that asks the user to enter a country they are interested in visiting. Then, if the country is in our database, we will provide them articles about travel restrictions and the country's COVID-19 statistics, including the number of cases, deaths, and recoveries. We will compare the death rate (death / cases) to the average death rate in the world, and determine if the area is safe to visit.
How we built it
We used the computer language Python and the libraries Pandas, Beautiful Soup, Discord, and Requests. Pandas, Beautiful Soup, and Requests are used to parse through the HTML text to search for certain keywords, such as the name of the country. The program can be used on platform Discord.
Challenges we ran into
This is our first time parsing through HTML and utilizing web scraping using Python. So, we had to spend an extended amount of time learning the method. Many countries in the database do not follow the pattern of formatting during the parsing process, thus the program being unable to identify them, and many countries are not in the database at all.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This is both of our first hackathons so we are proud that we were able to learn so much in a short amount of time and have a project to show for it! We successfully managed to use Python to parse through HTML. We also managed to implement that process in a Discord bot, so the program is more user friendly.
What we learned
We learned how to use Pandas, Beautiful Soup, and Requests. We also learned how to use Python to access the internet, and parse through different types of data by finding patterns in the HTML code.
What's next for Vacation Finder
Right now, the bot can only search by country. We plan to improve the bot so that it can search for COVID-19 statistics by city or even region. We also plan to find a better way to determine the safety of a location, as the death rate may not be sufficient enough information. Last, we plan to suggest hotels and airports based on the safety of the area. That way, travelers can make the most informed decision.
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