Trouble with some of IMDB Public Methods

SergioQ has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello,

If anyone has ever used IMDB::Film I thought they might have experienced this (Below is my code to retrieve info from iMDb).

The non-commented items return proper values. However if I try and retirved release_dates(), I get following error:

Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/local/share/perl/5.26.1/IMDB/Film.pm line 1486. CRITICAL Cannot retrieve url http://www.imdb.com/title/tt/releaseinfo at 4news.pl line 151.

I do notice that in the error they have don't have the movie id, just the tt. Which if I manually correct, I get the proper URL, and then loop through it for each different state. Or I could dig through $imdbOBJ, but that seems kind of kludgy. Or create the proper URL, and do it myself. I even though should I touch the modules code, but have never done that.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

$currec{mediaid} = iMDbs id number, which in this case is 'tt6723592'

    $imdbOBJ = new IMDB::Film(crit =>  $currec{mediaid}, user_agent   
+   => 'Opera/8.x', timeout => 30, cache => 0);
    
    say $imdbOBJ->title();  
    say  $imdbOBJ->status_descr();
#    say  $imdbOBJ->release_dates();
    say  $imdbOBJ->year();
#    say  $imdbOBJ->full_companies();
    say  $imdbOBJ->company();
    say  $imdbOBJ->recommendation_movies();
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Re: Trouble with some of IDDB Public Methods by Fletch (Bishop) on Dec 28, 2020 at 19:11 UTC
Looking at CPAN IMDB::Film was last updated seven years ago in which time I'm going to bet it's more than likely that their HTML (and glancing at the module source it looks like this thing is just scraping HTML) has changed in the meantime. You can try to patch things yourself and then submitting patches back (but then again since it hasn't been touched in this long it may have been abandoned; you can ping the author to check of course). (It looks like they (IMDB) do have an official API but the developer page says something along the lines of "contact us for pricing" so scraping may be the way you'll have to go for "unofficial" access.) The cake is a lie. The cake is a lie. The cake is a lie.	[reply]
Re^2: Trouble with some of IDDB Public Methods by SergioQ (Scribe) on Dec 29, 2020 at 18:28 UTC
Looking at CPAN IMDB::Film was last updated seven years ago One more thing I've learnt about CPAN, thanks!	[reply]
Re: Trouble with some of IDDB Public Methods by marto (Cardinal) on Dec 28, 2020 at 19:55 UTC
It may be easier/more maintainable if you parse the data you want yourself. See Re^2: running an example script with WWW::Mechanize* module for a mojo based example of scraping data from IMDB.	[reply]
Re^2: Trouble with some of IDDB Public Methods by SergioQ (Scribe) on Dec 30, 2020 at 03:29 UTC
It may be easier/more maintainable if you parse the data you want yourself. See Re^2: running an example script with WWW::Mechanize module for a mojo based example of scraping data from IMDB.* I was actually able to fix, or should I say add some better error catching to the IMDB::File modules. Given my level a little bit proud of myself. Looks like WWW::Mechanize is the way to go.Looks like I'm in for a long road of learning. I can definitely parse the main page, but some of the stuff am going to have to find a way to follow links, yada yada yada. But hey, I've some this far! Thanks again	[reply]
Re^3: Trouble with some of IDDB Public Methods by marto (Cardinal) on Dec 30, 2020 at 09:00 UTC
"I was actually able to fix, or should I say add some better error catching to the IMDB::File modules. Given my level a little bit proud of myself." Well done, it seems there are various patches for different things in the rt.cpan queue, and the github repo seems to have some merges. This could be worth pursuing depending on how much time you want to devote to it, alternative you should be able to use the mojo based solution from earlier as a starting point to get just what you need. If you have any problems with that just post and I'll take a look.	[reply]
Re^4: Trouble with some of IDDB Public Methods by Aldebaran (Curate) on Jan 01, 2021 at 04:45 UTC
Re^5: Trouble with some of IDDB Public Methods by marto (Cardinal) on Jan 01, 2021 at 09:54 UTC
Re^3: Trouble with some of IDDB Public Methods by Aldebaran (Curate) on Jan 01, 2021 at 06:16 UTC
I was actually able to fix, or should I say add some better error catching to the IMDB::File modules. Given my level a little bit proud of myself. I would love to see your source. I know that I've failed to get far with imdb changing over the years. Looks like WWW::Mechanize is the way to go. It's been my experience that WWW::Mechanize can't deal with javascript. This site is a 61 k clump of it.	[reply]
Re^4: Trouble with some of IDDB Public Methods by marto (Cardinal) on Jan 01, 2021 at 10:05 UTC
Re: Trouble with some of IMDB Public Methods by karlgoethebier (Abbot) on Dec 29, 2020 at 06:29 UTC
See also. As always: Everything has it’s price. «The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe» `perl -MCrypt::CBC -E 'say Crypt::CBC->new(-key=>'kgb',-cipher=>"Blowfish")->decrypt_hex($ENV{KARL});'`Help	[reply] [d/l]