Post by Peter Cooper on April 6th, 2007

Scraping IMDB with Ruby and Hpricot

Imdb

Tim from We Heart Code has written an easy-to-follow, detailed tutorial about scraping data from the Internet Movie Database using Ruby and Hpricot. As I would have suspected, Peter Szinek, developer of ScRUBYt! presents an even simpler solution in the comments.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Ruby Tricks, Tutorials. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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5 Responses to “Scraping IMDB with Ruby and Hpricot”

  1. #1
    Daniel Berger Says:
    April 6th, 2007 at 8:07 pm

    Does IMDb not have a backend interface of any sort?

  2. #2
    Tim Says:
    April 7th, 2007 at 12:18 am

    You can download plain text files of IMDB, however I believe the only web API is available on a pay-per-play basis.

  3. #3
    Peter Cooper Says:
    April 7th, 2007 at 6:31 am

    They have a whole database you can download, I believe. I think IMDB was just chosen as an 'example' in this case. It's really a demonstration of how to scrape anything structured.

  4. #4
    Peter Cooper Says:
    April 7th, 2007 at 6:39 am

    (As Tim said.. didn't see till moderation :))

  5. #5
    Ben Says:
    April 20th, 2007 at 3:35 pm

    why not use omdb.org ? its restfull, its implemented in rails and it's free :)