[Edu-sig] Movies anyone?

[David Reed]

On Dec 20, 2007, at 12:55 AM, kirby urner wrote:

> I'm wondering if anyone is using, or thinking of using, this imdbpy to
> give students an early appreciation for the power of an open source
> Python package, to deliver relevant movie-related information.
>
> Cut and pasting (excerpting) from
> http://imdbpy.sourceforge.net/docs/README.users.txt, the scripts look
> like this (if you've not used imdb:  every movie, actor etc. is tagged
> with a number):
>
> $ get_movie.py 0133093
>

<results snipped>

> I've written my own screen scraper for imdb (probably wrote about it
> here, don't remember), but it never performed satisfactorily.  Used it
> with one Saturday Academy class as a part of my intro.  At least
> useful for explaining what "screen scraper" means.  Imdbpy would be
> more impressive I think, also better than the xml-rpc script we played
> with at Winterhaven (8th grade, write-up at my site).
>
>


You can download ASCII files with the info from imdb.com.

http://www.imdb.com/interfaces#plain

I use this for an assignment to play the Kevin Bacon game when  
studying graph algorithms. I have a couple Python scripts I wrote to  
massage the data into a format better suited for that assignment. I  
also remove movies containing "bad words" - IMDB contains "adult  
movies" (I found that out after one of my students looked through the  
file - fortunately it was a student who was not offended).

Before using scripts that scrape their website, I would read:

http://www.imdb.com/help/show_article?conditions

IANAL, but that seems to indicate screen scraping of their website is  
not allowed. Using the ASCII files for personal use is allowed, but  
you are not allowed to redistribute them.

Dave