Does anyone know of any (preferrably free) supported api's for accessing movie showtimes by zip code?
I don't believe any existing api's, such as netflix or imdb, provide this information.
Thanks!
A:
My guess is that your best bet on that (unless these guys have RSS feeds) would be to scrape the HTML with a language that supports regular expressions.
Mind you, that's ugly and every time they change their code, yours -could- break.
unfortunately none of them have rss. the scraping isn't bad with a decent html parser. but i'm more worried about violating terms of service than having to update code every once in a while.
2009-01-13 18:24:28
A:
I can't find one.
You could try screen-scraping from Yahoo Movies: http://movies.yahoo.com/showtimes/movie?z=60630&date=20090113&mid=1810038822
z = zip code
date = year + month + day (as a string)
mid = movieID, which you will have to grab from Yahoo Movies
EndangeredMassa
2009-01-13 17:15:41
+3
A:
Don't know if Google exposes it as an api but this looks a lot like what you want. http://www.google.com/movies?hl=en&near=90210&dq=movie+times+90210&sa=X&oi=showtimes&ct=title&cd=1
Jeremy Wilde
2009-01-13 17:16:38
+2
A:
sorry, should've searched a bit more before posting the question.
some creative searching on del.icio.us has revealed an undocumented yahoo! movies api (sample api call).
looks nice.
+1
A:
After looking around a little bit, I found Dapper (open.dapper.net) to be a great solution for creating this type of feed...
Here is the feed I made, which takes a movie title and a zip code as parameters. (most others available only searched by ZIP)
http://www.dapper.net/dapp-howto-use.php?dappName=GoogleMoviesbynameANDzip
took about 5 minutes to set up...
bitless
2009-08-06 10:16:21
A:
Did Yahoo just remove their undocumented APIs? I can't access it anymore but I can't find anybody talking about it (the removal) either.
Georges
2009-11-11 03:43:24
A:
That undocumented YAHOO api referenced above has been great... I've been using it for a while... unfortunately YAHOO has just made it disappear (after 11/4/09)... without some YAHOO authorization... and it doesn't look like they are giving that out! :(
(I hope another idea above works out for me)
-- Thomas
derks
2009-11-11 15:53:57
A:
Yep, Yahoo apparently removed their secret movie API in November 2009.
It seems everyone gets their data from TMS Data Direct: http://www.tmsdatadirect.com/
broox
2009-11-23 21:19:01
A:
I too am looking for showtimes I can legitimately scrape and republish. Yahoo's sound like if you don't do it for commercial purposes, it's not prohibited... or maybe that's wishful thinking on my part.
You agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade, resell or exploit for any commercial purposes, any portion or use of, or access to, the Yahoo! Services
MM
2010-01-03 21:02:50
A:
I was also looking for a showtime API, and like you, I have not found a good API for the movie showtimes. I decided to write my own "showtime API", based on the Google Showtimes. Please check it out.
It is a simple PHP-script, but "it does what it should do":
<?php
/**
* Google Showtime grabber
*
* This file will grab the last showtimes of theatres nearby your zipcode.
* Please make the URL your own! You can also add parameters to this URL:
* &date=0|1|2|3 => today|1 day|2 days|etc..
*
* Please download the latest version of simple_html_dom.php on sourceForge:
* http://sourceforge.net/projects/simplehtmldom/files/
*
* @author Bas van Dorst <[email protected]>
* @version 0.1
* @package GoogleShowtime
*/
require_once('simple_html_dom.phps');
$html = new simple_html_dom();
$html->load_file('http://www.google.nl/movies?mid=&hl=en&near=1400AB');
print '<pre>';
foreach($html->find('#movie_results .theater') as $div) {
// print theater and address info
print "Theate: ".$div->find('h2 a',0)->innertext."\n";
print "Address: ". $div->find('.info',0)->innertext."\n";
// print all the movies with showtimes
foreach($div->find('.movie') as $movie) {
print "\tMovie: ".$movie->find('.name a',0)->innertext.'<br />';
print "\tTime: ".$movie->find('.times',0)->innertext.'<br />';
}
print "\n\n";
}
// clean up memory
$html->clear();
?>
Example: http:// code.basvd.nl/showtime_grabber_0.1/Google_showtime.php
Download simple_html_dom.php: http:// code.basvd.nl/showtime_grabber_0.1/
Bas van Dorst
2010-01-21 21:44:26
A:
Does anyone publish an actual api for this, like a web service? I'd hate to do screen scraping. I'd really love to write a phone or ipad app that had a timeline which showed what movies play nearby in the next 2 hours. No web page shows it this way,and it's typically how I want to see it. "What shows can I see in the next couple of hours?" I'd love to write the app if I can get the data. Any leads? JR
jason
2010-03-18 05:22:45
A:
Jeepasaurus
2010-04-12 16:06:47