Looking for idea on a webscraping based requirement

Hi everyone,

I’d like to hear some ideas for my use case.

I’d like to use HA to collect and display some information I’m scraping from the web. The information is a daily menu from a restaurant in my area.

I’ve immediately excluded the Scrape platform since the data requires a little bit of looping on the selectors, so I’ve ended up with a python script using BeautifulSoup.
Now I have a python script that does what I wanted and I was thinking about what would be the best way to plug this in HA.

I’ve considered multiple ways:
a. command_line sensor
b. pyscript
c. custom_component (eventually)

But I’ve faced a blocking issue from the very with solution a, the simplest one:
my data exceeds the limit of 255 characters.

I’ve read that I attributes are not bound to this 255 chars limit, and that could be a way, but facing this limit made me wonder if I’m taking the wrong approach and I shouldn’t create a Sensor at all.

Ideally, I’d like to do multiple things with this data, although I haven’t yet decided the details:

  • display the data in the UI
  • send the data (or a subsection of it to Telegram)
  • send the data to Alexa (or ask Alexa to read the data)

Do you have any ideas on how I should approach this task?