Standing downstairs at the dormitory building with large bags in hand, Natsukawa Sosuke let out a long sigh of relief. It was already 3 PM, and after following the phone's map all the way, he finally reached the dorms. Carrying his laptop, he had almost died from exhaustion along the way. Looking at the modern-looking dormitory building before him, he noted it was much more luxurious than his university dorm in his previous life. This was the 'Beginner Village' (Novice Village) where he would spend the next three years.
Stepping into the dormitory lobby on the first floor, he walked towards the dorm manager's window with Ayanokoji Kiyotaka. After the dorm manager verified the student information, she handed a room card to Natsukawa: "Room 403. The rule manual is in the room; read it carefully."
"403, thankfully not 404." Natsukawa took the room card, his mouth twitching subtly. "If it were 404, you might not find me one day, Ayanokoji. What's your room number?"
"401."
"Then we're neighbors now. You'll have to visit more often," Natsukawa patted Ayanokoji's shoulder, only to realize as he raised his arm that he had been carrying things the whole way, and his hand was almost useless. If he had kept carrying them, he might have managed, but now that he had put them down, picking them up again wouldn't be so easy. He looked at the heavy laptop and miscellaneous items on the floor, then at Ayanokoji's free hand, and an idea sparked in his mind.
"Ayanokoji, my dear friend!" he said sincerely. "As the saying goes, 'Hesitation leads to defeat, decisiveness leads to giving away for free'... ah, no, it's 'decisiveness leads to friendship'! Look at my body, ready to collapse with a gust of wind. Could you help a brother out and carry these up to the fourth floor?"
Ayanokoji looked at him in silence for two seconds, seemingly processing his words: "Are we already good friends?"
"Of course!" Natsukawa began to spout nonsense with a straight face. "Good friends have this kind of mutual help relationship. Today you pull me up, tomorrow I push you forward; this is just the daily life between good brothers."
Perhaps a keyword was triggered, or perhaps he thought it was a small favor to do, but Ayanokoji silently took the heaviest supermarket shopping bag. "...Let's go."
The two took the elevator to the fourth floor. After swiping the card and pushing open the door to room 403, a standard single apartment layout came into view, complete with a kitchen and bathroom. After Natsukawa placed his laptop on the bedroom desk, he arranged his toiletries in the bathroom.
"Thanks, Ayanokoji, catch!" Natsukawa tossed Ayanokoji a drink he had picked up at the supermarket.
"No thanks. I'm going back to my room first." Ayanokoji caught it with one hand, looked at the drink, and silently opened the door and left.
"Alright, you may withdraw. I am also weary," Natsukawa joked as he closed the door, finally leaving him alone in the room.
The world quieted down. Natsukawa walked to the desk, unpacked his laptop, and connected it to the power.
"Alright, it's time to test the quality of the 'Novice Gift Pack,'" he rubbed his hands together, his eyes gleaming with the unique light of a tech enthusiast. "Although my main focus in my previous life was embedded systems, and I'm not as familiar with big data crawlers, the principles are similar! The reason I chose this is precisely so that I can 'build my own wheels' in an environment where 'there's nothing, and everything relies on manual work!'
Windows, boot up!
Natsukawa's fingers flew across the keyboard. The laptop came with pre-installed Windows, saving him the trouble of finding a USB drive for installation. He first installed the classic Notepad++ and FileZilla.
'No VS Code? No big deal, Notepad++ is the future!'
Next came the main event. He skillfully downloaded the Python 2.7 installer.
Although Python 3 was already available online, it seemed to have just been released, and its ecosystem wasn't as rich. He decided to stick with 2.7 to save himself a lot of trouble.
The installation process went smoothly. Then he began to configure the necessary libraries. Fortunately, the school's intranet resources were quite abundant, providing a local mirror source for pip.
pip install requests
pip install beautifulsoup4
pip install lxml
After a few commands, the core dependency libraries were successfully installed.
'Thanks to the school's IT department! Indeed, standing on the shoulders of giants is comfortable; no need to manually implement everything from the HTTP protocol.'
But soon, he encountered his first hurdle. When he tried to install pandas for data analysis, the command line spewed a pile of headache-inducing dependency errors.
'Sure enough, configuring a Python environment on Windows always gives you'surprises.' I was spoiled by Anaconda in my previous life; now I realize the cruelty of a native environment.'
He sighed and decisively gave up on pandas.
"No pandas, so I can't do data analysis? You underestimate Lin Bei's manual optimization capabilities!" He rolled up his non-existent sleeves. "Isn't it just dictionaries, lists, and loops? Writing the statistical logic myself might even yield better performance! (Big lie)"
Core development, commence!
He created a new.py file and started typing code.
#First, import the life-saving libraries
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import time
import datetime
import re
Fortunately, the school forum could also be accessed via a computer webpage, not just the mobile app.
"First, I need to simulate a login to get the cookie..." he murmured to himself, examining the school forum's login interface. "This form structure is a bit retro."
Soon, he finished the network request part and successfully fetched the HTML of the forum's homepage.
"Next is parsing the post list and extracting the posting time." He frowned, staring at the dense HTML source code. "This DOM structure... it's written a bit haphazardly. No unified CSS class names? I'll have to rely on regex and parent-child node positioning to get through this."
'BeautifulSoup isn't omnipotent; with non-standard HTML, you still need brute force! It's like being given a Swiss Army knife, only to find you mostly have to rely on the toothpick inside to pick locks.'
He fully immersed himself in battling the HTML structure. Time quietly slipped away with the sound of keyboard clicks.
After an unknown amount of time, the protest from his stomach pulled him back to reality. Outside the window, the sky had already darkened.
"Indeed, coding is fun for a while, but continuous coding... makes you hungry." He rubbed his dry eyes and decided to solve the dinner problem first.
Fortunately, the school had more than just a cafeteria. Natsukawa found a decent-looking ramen shop in the commercial street and satisfied his hunger.
After dinner, Natsukawa decided to stop by the supermarket to buy some easy-to-prepare ingredients. After all, he didn't always want to eat out, so buying some things to keep on hand was a good precaution.
He picked out some rice, noodles, pork belly, eggs, and other ingredients from the supermarket and returned to his dorm under the cool night breeze.
Deep into the night, the light in room 403 turned on again. Natsukawa took a quick shower and returned to the world of code. He optimized the parsing logic and personally wrote the core functions for time string conversion and hourly statistics.
Around one in the morning, he ran the final test. The script executed successfully, and the console clearly displayed the time distribution statistics of forum posts over the past 24 hours.
"Done!" He let out a long breath, a sense of accomplishment dispelling his fatigue. "Although it's just a prototype, the core pipeline is complete! Requests for fetching, BeautifulSoup for parsing, manual data processing... a one-stop service!"
This feeling was like successfully assembling a working machine with limited tools, each gear personally debugged.
He saved the code and closed his laptop. Outside the window, the entire academy was silent.
"Indeed, some things are ingrained in your DNA," Natsukawa said with a chuckle, shaking his head as he turned off the room lights. "Like spending the night solving dependencies and debugging bugs."
The room quietly fell into darkness, but his school life, accompanied by his first hand-built 'information collector,' was quietly getting on track. Although he knew the true nature beneath the school's glamorous facade, he couldn't directly state it. He needed concrete evidence to support his 'deductions.' He wanted to convince the buyer that the information he provided was worth the price. And this rudimentary crawler would become his 'eye' for 'gaining foresight' in this special campus.