Downloads your PGN files from chess.com
pgnscraper depends on Beautiful Soup 4, a tarball of which can be downloaded here. The bs4 folder must be extracted to the same directory as pgnscraper.py. Your folder structure therefore would look like this:
pgnscraper/
pgnscraper.py
bs4/
...
pgnscraper is written in Python so of course you will need that too. If you are running Mac OS X or Linux, chances are you already have it installed.
Open pgnscraper.py in a text editor and edit your username, password (optional), and pgndir.
You can run the script by simply executing python “path/to/pgnscraper.py”.
You supply your chess.com username and the directory you want to save your PGNs to, and every time the script is run, it will download any PGNs you do not have into the directory. The script is limited to your games from the past 6 weeks and your past 50 games of each type.
The PGNs are organized by type (correspondence or live), then by subtype (standard/chess960) if a correspondence game, or by time control (standard/blitz/bullet) if a live game, and then by year and then month.
/pgns/
correspondence/
chess960/
2013/
01/
....
02/
...
2012/
...
standard/
....
live/
standard/
2013/
...
blitz/
...
bullet/
...
PGNs are saved in the format white_vs_black_yyyy_mm_dd.pgn, where white is the name of the white player, black is the black player, yyyy is the year, mm is the month, and dd is the day. Keep in mind that the date is given by the date the game completed, which differs from downloading the PGN in the browser, which is dated by the date you started the game. It is done this way because that is the date given in the Game Archive, and it is quicker to use this date than to load a second page to get the starting date.
Entering in your password is optional. The script will work without it. In the future, you will be able to enter your password to download the PGNs of the analyses you submitted. Also, premium users will be able to download games that are older than 6 weeks.