Movie times database?

They have: 2 posts

Joined: Feb 2002

I'm just wondering if there is some kind of public database of movie theater showtimes. There are tons of sites on the web that allow you to put in your zip code and spit out the movie times for your local theaters.

Where do all these sites get the information? It is updated daily so it must be an automated process.

I run a local portal site and want to offer show times for our local theaters, but I don't want to link out to another site.

Thanks in advance.

Mark Hensler's picture

He has: 4,048 posts

Joined: Aug 2000

There are a few possibilities. The first is that these sites may be paying theater chanes to send them their daily schedules. The other possibility is that they are ripping the inforamation right off the theater's site.

You could use a cron job to parse theaters' sites in the wee hours of the morning, and update a DB on your server. Then you'll have all the information stored locally.

Mark Hensler
If there is no answer on Google, then there is no question.

detox's picture

They have: 571 posts

Joined: Feb 2001

a screen scrape would be the way to go if you didn;t want the hastle of getting in touch with the cinemas themselves.

what language would you want to do it in? 4guysfromrolla has some articles on this. Just do a search on screen scrape

They have: 2 posts

Joined: Feb 2002

Thanks for all the suggestions. I was able to get what I wanted using a cgi script called "PageRipper". It gets the information for my local theaters from moviefone.com and displays them on my page.

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