This repository contains a C library and a command-line application for accessing and displaying scores from the National Hockey League (NHL).
The library automatically downloads data from the publicly available (undocumented) NHL Stats API and features a disk cache that aims to reduce data transfer. The command-line app can display scores for any given dates in a few different formats. In particular, the app is capable of emulating page 235 of the teletext service (a.k.a. "Teksti-TV") provided by the Finnish Broadcasting Company Yle.
The library, libnhl, is written in ANSI C and it has three dependencies:
cJSON, CURL and SQLite.
The command-line app, nhl, is written in C99. In addition to libnhl, the app depends on the GNU C library.
In Ubuntu 20.04 or later, all required dependencies can be installed by:
sudo apt install build-essential libcjson-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libsqlite3-dev
The library and the command-line application can then be compiled simply by running
make
from the repository root folder.
The shared object file libnhl.so and the executable nhl will be placed in their respective source directories lib and src.
To execute the application, simply run
src/nhl
from the repository root folder. Run src/nhl --help to see all available command-line options.
The easiest way to "install" nhl is to create a symbolic link in a folder which is in $PATH.
For example, if <repo> is the repository root folder,
ln -s <repo>/src/nhl ~/bin/nhl
should work, assuming that ~/bin exists and is in $PATH.
Now, you can run nhl from anywhere and the program should start.
The screenshot displays whatever font was used in the terminal. As a comparison, the original Teksti-TV looked like this on April 3, 2022:
Below is a simple example application that uses libnhl.
Error checking etc. are omitted for simplicity.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <nhl/nhl.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
// Initialization (note: this will not enable cache)
Nhl *nhl = nhl_init(NULL);
// Data extraction
NhlDate date = {.year=2022, .month=1, .day=3};
NhlSchedule *schedule;
nhl_schedule_get(nhl, &date, NHL_QUERY_FULL, &schedule);
// Print
for (int i=0; i!=schedule->num_games; ++i) {
NhlGame *game = schedule->games[i];
printf("%s - %s : %d - %d\n", game->away->team_name, game->home->team_name,
game->away_score, game->home_score);
}
// Clean-up and exit
nhl_schedule_unget(nhl, schedule);
nhl_close(nhl);
return 0;
}If you save the above code in a file helloworld.c, you can compile it by:
cc helloworld.c -o helloworld -I<repo>/include -L<repo>/lib -lnhl
Again, <repo> denotes path to the repository root folder.
The compiled program can then be run:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=<repo>/lib ./helloworld
This should print the following output for the (only) game that was played on Jan 3, 2022:
Oilers - Rangers : 1 - 4
You can try to show other games by modifying the date variable.
The purpose of the Dockerfile is to provide a clean environment, e.g., for debugging.
It is not recommended to normally use nhl from a Docker container.
In particular, the disk cache will not work (unless you provide persisent storage) and times may be displayed using a wrong time zone.
Anyway, the Docker image (here called nhltest) can be built as follows:
docker build -t nhltest .
To start a container, run:
docker run -it nhltest
Now, commands such as nhl and nhl --help should be available.
https://gitlab.com/dword4/nhlapi : Unofficial documentation for the NHL Stats API.
https://teksti-tv-235.firebaseapp.com : An online Teksti-TV emulator supporting advanced statistics and standings.
https://github.com/peruukki/nhl-recap + https://github.com/peruukki/nhl-score-api : An online app for showing animated NHL scores, together with its back-end.
The software in this repository is licensed under the MIT license.
See LICENSE file for details.
This project is not affiliated with the National Hockey League (NHL). You should consult the legal terms of NHL to learn how to use the data that is accessible using (but not provided by) the software in this repository.