API or any other way to access IMDB TOP 250 list?

Question

I have done extensive research and found that I couldn't find an API. Is there any available API to get the TOP 250 list?

Or another way to get access to the list?

I tried accessing the page HTML and parsing in my JSP backend. But the problem here is that I get only a skeleton, the list loads as AJAX.

Any way of web scraping it?

Any usage Idea would be appreciated...

Why don't make a request to the endpoint the script calls (make the ajax call)? — james_bond, Jul 27 '12 at 13:42
possible duplicate of [Does IMDB provide an API?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1966503/does-imdb-provide-an-api) — Ernest Friedman-Hill, Jul 27 '12 at 13:43
but no solution has a way to get the TOP 250 list.. Am specific on the "TOP 250 list" — vivek_jonam, Jul 27 '12 at 13:47

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 21 '13 at 20:08

6

The easiest way is to just download the data from the IMDb alternate interfaces.

The file you want is ratings.list.gz. The Top 250 films are listed in the first section.

answered Mar 21 '13 at 20:08

David Chappelle

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I believe they are updated weekly. And the top 250 movies would not change very much day to day, anyway. – David Chappelle Mar 26 '13 at 13:41
I have written a script that converts all the `.list.gz` files to JSON which should make it easier to work with: https://github.com/oxplot/imdb2json – Mansour Oct 31 '15 at 01:23
Mansour: those files are enormous already, and I'd guess JSON is even larger due to the tags for formatting. What most people do is load them into a relational database for queries. I have done this for SQL Server and others have written a parser for python/mysql. – David Chappelle Nov 02 '15 at 13:37

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 09 '15 at 07:56

2

Yes now there is a API called the omdbapi

http://www.omdbapi.com/

answered Sep 09 '15 at 07:56

Jaysheel Utekar

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Nice one..! But it has very limited functionality. – Jay Modi Oct 08 '15 at 11:54
@JayModi I know still its the only one of its type as of I know – Jaysheel Utekar Oct 08 '15 at 12:06

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 19 '16 at 18:41

I came across this problem too and I solved it with some scraping. Here is the Python code:

import requests
import re

top250_url = "http://akas.imdb.com/chart/top"


def get_top250():
    r = requests.get(top250_url)
    html = r.text.split("\n")
    result = []
    for line in html:
        line = line.rstrip("\n")
        m = re.search(r'data-titleid="tt(\d+?)">', line)
        if m:
            _id = m.group(1)
            result.append(_id)
    #
    return result

It returns the IMDb IDs of the Top 250 movies. Then, using the imdbpy package you can ask all the information about a movie, since you have the movie ID.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 09 '15 at 18:48

0

Available from there:

http://api.myapifilms.com/imdb.do

Get url for it is there: (You'll need a free token)

 http://api.myapifilms.com/imdb/top?token=GET A FREE API KEY&format=json&data=0

(Not my site)

answered Nov 09 '15 at 18:48

Callombert

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 11 '21 at 19:27

0

https://www.theimdbapi.com/ this one is great, i am usng from sometime now

answered Feb 11 '21 at 19:27

Chali

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API or any other way to access IMDB TOP 250 list?

5 Answers5