PGN Helper

About

PGN Helper is a collection of python scripts to easily download and process pgn files.

Fetch files

With the fetch_files_from_pgnmentor.py script you can easily bulk-download all the pgn files from one of the three categories in which the website pgnmentor.com organizes them: by player, by opening, or by event.

Create opening book

Given a folder ('pgn') of pgn files, the create_opening_book.py script creates a json file which represents the tree of all the first n moves played in every match of each pgn file by players which elo is greater than x, where n and x are parameters of the script.

For instance, here is how a json opening book generated with 2500+ players and 2 moves by the script looks like (# is the number of times the move has been played):

{
  "e4": {
    "#": 478088,
    "e5": {
      "#": 118698,
      "Nf3": {
        "#": 74146,
        "Nf6": {
          "#": 4778
        },
        "Nc6": {
          "#": 31850
        },
        "d6": {
          "#": 445
        }
      },
    ...
    }
  ...
  }
...
}

Remember that you can, and should, minify the json file to save some space!

I also made a few opening books, each one with 2500+ players but different number of moves, so that you can directly download them.

Setup

The only dependency is beautifulsoup4: pip install beautifulsoup4