[FOSSOVERFLOW-25] feat: Automatic Scraping & Parsing of Academic Calendar

Feature Request: Automatic Scraping & Parsing of Academic Calendar

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Problem Statement

Current Issue: The academic calendar is uploaded on the IIT Bhilai website as a PDF/HTML table, and currently admins must manually copy dates into our Calendar component. This is time-consuming, error-prone, and requires updates every semester/year.

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Proposed Solution

✅ Automatic Academic Calendar Scraping

• Add a backend service that periodically scrapes the academic calendar from: https://www.iitbhilai.ac.in/index.php?pid=aca_calendar
• Parse events and categorize them like "academic", "holiday", etc

✅ Integration with Existing Calendar UI

• New events should automatically appear in the existing Calendar component with category-appropriate icons and color coding.
• Admins should have ability to review/edit scraped data before publishing (optional improvement).

Technical Notes

Layer	Requirement
Scraper	A cron-triggered script
Data Parsing	Match patterns like: "holiday", "exam", "commencement", "registration"
Database	Add relevant fields to calendar events table
Retry & Fail-Safe	If scraping fails, continue using last known data
Optional	Cache PDF locally with versioning for historical comparison

Possible Libraries

• BeautifulSoup4 / lxml (for HTML scraping)
• PyMuPDF or pdfplumber if format changes back to PDF

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Alternatives Considered

1. Manual Upload of Events ❌ Still requires regular admin effort
2. Direct API Feed from Institute Website ❌ No such API currently exists

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Mockups & Visual Examples

• Checkout the figma design mockups in README