Hypothetically: Import data from IMDB

[batesman666]

IMDB being the Internet Movie Database

I don't even really wanna know how it's done (yet , but we use the IMDB to get data on the films in our database (Year, Length, Actors, Director, Cinematographer, etc.), and we've been doing it manually for all these years, copy/pasting and formatting. Takes quite a lot of time, as you can guess.

So, could this be automated? As I said, I don't expect a full solution or anything, just a pointer to the right direction maybe...

many thanks!

[BobWeaver]

I won't address the legality of what you are trying to do, but make sure you do.

This is similar to a number of questions that have been posted about importing and parsing raw text files. You need to save the page source and then open it in a simple text editor to examine the formatting that surrounds the data you want to extract. When you find the text that immediately precedes and follows the data (usually html tags), then you can design a calculation formula to extract the part you want. To find the start of the data:

Start = Position(PageSource,PreambleText,1,1)+Length(PreambleText)

Similarly, the end of data:

End = Position(PageSource,PostambleText,1,1)

Then to extract the data itself:

Data = Middle(PageSource, Start,End-Start)

You will have to repeat these calculations for each item of data that you need to extract from the page source.

[cjaeger]

IMDB used to have an XML interface to its data which served as a reference implementation in many XML tutorials. Unfortunately, it seems to have been taken down as of May 2003 ... - Would have been just perfect for XML import.

afterthought: probably just moved to the pro services section ... give it a try

googlesearch imdb xml xsl

[cjaeger]

IMDB used to have an XML interface to its data which served as a reference implementation in many XML tutorials. Unfortunately, it seems to have been taken down as of May 2003 ... - Would have been just perfect for XML import.