Tim from We Heart Code has written an easy-to-follow, detailed tutorial about scraping data from the Internet Movie Database using Ruby and Hpricot. As I would have suspected, Peter Szinek, developer of ScRUBYt! presents an even simpler solution in the comments.
Comments
Daniel Berger ·
Does IMDb not have a backend interface of any sort?
Tim ·
You can download plain text files of IMDB, however I believe the only web API is available on a pay-per-play basis.
Peter Cooper ·
They have a whole database you can download, I believe. I think IMDB was just chosen as an 'example' in this case. It's really a demonstration of how to scrape anything structured.
Peter Cooper ·
(As Tim said.. didn't see till moderation :))
Ben ·
why not use omdb.org ? its restfull, its implemented in rails and it's free :)