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IMDB Queries/Data

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pELUKi

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2013
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Hi All ...

New to the junction and seeing as there has been several posts regarding the IMDB, and my recent interest in the same, I thought it would be a good introduction to start on here! I have looked at the various IMDB invocations posted - jayfella prg/source links are broken and although I knocked up a CS form framework and class to hold the class files, it appears to work ineffectively, and also had the usual problems getting the HttpUtility working in Framework 4, and it would have been nice to see the Source contruct or at least the exe in action. Also I couldn't get shadow.prx php version going under my localhost apache/php set up, but, possibly due to my rather sketchy knowledge of PHP/MySQL as I was more at home with the CGI and Perl!
Basically I was wondering if any of you could or would be able to shed some light on the movie ID, is this a static ID or is it generated from data regarding the movie itself - as was the case with MusicDB, where the ID is generated from Album/Track data. Any help would be gratefully received ...

... pELUKi ...
 
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Hi deliteblogger ...

Thanks for your input, and would advise that 'Google' was in fact my first - and usually is - port of call, and have already seen that particular article, which adds little in order to be able to firmly establish whether or not the ID is static, and feel that in some cases, advice given at stackoverflow can fall well short of being useful, and have found that many of the programmers/advisers offer far more complicated - or over the top - solutions than are really necessary, but again, thanks all the same for your interest and response ...

... pELUKi ...
 
I've seen a script sometime back that would Google search the Movie/TV Show name and then use Regex to grab the imdb link.

Maybe you could create a similar script, thus avoiding the need of knowing the Movie/TV Show ID.
 
I'm pretty sure you cannot 'generate' the id starting from any of the data regarding the movie, if that is your question.
My guess is that it's just a simple numbering - go to the IMDB page of any movie and replace the id with any smaller number than the current id, it will probably be a working IMDB url. Even http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0000001/ works.

To get the id you can either scrape IMDB's search, or Google's, as Halcyon suggested. Or use an unofficial site providing an API.
 
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Thanks to the Members who responded and tried to help regarding my request, and just to keep you in the loop, I have now resolved the issue and created a relatively simple C# Application with a Regex parser that fulfils all my requirements regarding Movie Queries, it provides 15 headings covering amongst other things - Title, Director, RunTime, Writer(s), Actors, Plot and Image etc, and which also includes the elusive ID. I tested this on a recursive run of 80 or so Titles, recovering Data on all but one, and which in fact to my surprise took only a matter of seconds to complete, it adds the recovered data to a File for each query, based on the recovered title, which allows the Data to be reloaded into the ListView for subsequent viewing, which is normally populated from the actual Web Search, and also adds the recovered data to a master dB for further useage. When I have tidied up the code - as and when time permits - to a more professional standard, I will post it up in the hope it may assist others with similar problems/interest ...

Addendum ...
toRRfriend - Thanks for the info, but again I had already seen this, and although I have Python installed in my localhost Server for development, its not one of my languages of choice, and last used it some considerable time ago in the early days of becoming experienced in the XBox STFS, but again thanks all the same for your interest and input ...

... pELUKi ...
 
Majority of IMDB scrapers out there use terrible regex patterns to work and what not, made by people who don't know any better.

Soon as imdb updates their site even just slightly, they're all broken.
 
Thanks for the input, but I have been programming since the late 70's and cut my teeth on Perl and Regex, Regex is an art form and very few people know how to use it at all, never mind use it properly let alone to its' maximum effect, and whilst I am no Regex master, in these particular applications it is best used for parse delimiting so that cross splitting is effective even when data sets change, I have now recursively loaded nearly a thousand data items, and only had two failures, one due to a bad data set, and one due to my bad allocation programming, as I explained my queries are saved, as is, and the files are build as the title named files, and also saved in a database, 'Are we there Yet' has an appended '?' which nerfed' the save code string, which I needed to correct, when I have put a few thousand more files through it just to see if there any more anomolies, I will then post it up, or thought I would, I made an image of the current work in progress to load up, as an illustration, but, apparently I dont have permission to attach files or images, so things will have to wait until such time as I have ...

... pELUKi ...
 
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