While i was studying for a levels. i found out i was spending a lot of time searching for and downloading past papers.since the sites that offered these files were clumsy had not so great ux.finding a single past past paper required you to naviagte to atleast three pages.The final page being an index of all past papers for that particular subject. so like any sane person i went on and created pastpaper bot aka ppbot.
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i found out that the pastpaper sites are like huge indexes containing files which are named to a standard convenient format. i used this to my advantage an wrote a quick scraper.the final scraper takes works like this
bash scrp.py -url physicsmrathstutor.com/
the scraper identifies the subject and unit of the past paper.and stores all entries on the url to a mongodb.another script then downloads these pdfs and makes them available locally
making the telegram bot was quite straight forward i just had to get enough data from the user and call the db to get the files. i used the python telegram bot package to easily interact with python
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i didnt expect much if any users to actually use it other than me. but by the time the exams ended the bot had more than 2000 pastpapers to x unique students.