[Tutor] Data Gathering

[Kent Johnson]

Johnny Jelinek IV wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was wondering if something like this is possible; Can I create a 
> python script that will connect to a website to use it's search features 
> to gather information for me?  For example, if I wanted information 
> about a movie from imdb, or something from wikipedia, but didn't want to 
> go to the website, could I create a program to let me search and it 
> would output data from those sites to me in my program?

For IMDB specifically there are a couple of Python packages that will 
fetch the data for you.
http://imdbpy.sourceforge.net/
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/IMDb/0.1.2

In general, you will have to learn about form submission using urllib or 
urllib2 and HTML parsing with perhaps BeautifulSoup. A few links to help:

http://docs.python.org/dev/howto/urllib2.html
http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/documentation.html

Kent