In recent times, if you want to check what’s on in the cinema in your city, your only option was to sort through the online listings by movie or by cinema. My girlfriend told me that newspapers – years ago – used to list movies by hour, and this sorting method was extremely handy to consult on the same day.
As at the time I was practicing web scraping with Scrapy I decided to give it a go, fill this gap in the online cinema listing space and create a website that she and other people can use, with the look & feel of an old newspaper.
I created Finema by writing a very simple page of code that includes PHP, HTML and JavaScript together. The PHP code queries and fetches in real-time a JSON file from my personal server with the cinema listings data. The JSON file on the server is generated by a developed Scrapy script that captures the daily movies timings from a popular Irish online entertainment website every few hours.
All movies of the selected cinemas are listed by hour, starting from the first movie of the day and finishing with the last one. By clicking on the cinema name, it is possible to visualize the daily shows in that particular cinema only, while the drop-down allows to select a specific movie. The two filters can be combined.
The risk of this type of aggregators lies in the source of the scraped data: if the website from which the data is taken changes its HTML code, the scraping script can break and return corrupted or no data. This is why it is important to put in place regular automatic checks and notifications, in order to immediately amend your scripts as the breaking happens.
Also, if you are thinking to create a similar project, remember to check the Terms & Conditions of the website from which you are capturing the data, as they may forbid scraping of their content.
Would a similar website be useful in your city, too? Write me and we can make it happen!
