Stripping Movie Showtimes from a text file and inserting them into a mysql DB

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

Yo! I just got this script but I can't quite get it to work. I am unclear on the usage at the command line. I am looking for theaters in the 95501 area code and i believe 392 is the theater number. Is the usage 'theater_rss.pl <392>' or 'theater_rss.pl 392'? Any disecction of this code would be helpful. Ideally. i need my hand held. Any one got the time to give me a step-by-step? Thanx.

#!/usr/bin/perl
# theater_rss.pl
#Accepts a Yahoo! Movies theater ID and prints
# an RSS feed of currently playing movies.
# Usage: theater_rss.pl <theater_ID>
#
# You can find theater IDs at Yahoo! Movies
# at http://movies.yahoo.com/

use strict;
use XML::RSS::SimpleGen;

# Grab the incoming theater ID
my $tid = join(' ', @ARGV) or die "Usage: theater_rss.pl <theater_ID>\
+n";
my $theater_title = "My favorite theater";

# Set the theater schedule URL
my $url = "http://acid1.oa.yahoo.com/mbl/mov/tdet?tid=$tid";

# Download the schedule page
my $content = get_url($url);

# Find the theater name
if ($content =~ m!<dl><dt>(.*?)</dt>!sg) {
$theater_title = $1;
}

# Start the RSS Feed
rss_new($url, "$theater_title Schedule");
rss_language('en');
rss_webmaster('insert your email address');

rss_daily();

# Set the regular expression to find data
my $regex = '<table.*?>.*?mid=(.*?)">(.*?)</a></td>.*?';
   $regex .= '<td>(.*?)</td>.*?</table>';

# Loop through the HTML, grabbing elements
while ($content =~ m!$regex!sg) {
  # rss_item accepts url, title, description.
  my $url = "http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hv&cf=info&id=$1";
  rss_item($url, $2, $3);
}

# Warn if nothing was found
die "No items in this content?! {{\n$_\n}}\nAborting"
 unless rss_item_count();

# Save the rss file as <theater_ID>.rss
rss_save("$tid.rss");
exit;
[download]

Edited by planetscape - added code tags

Comment on Stripping Movie Showtimes from a text file and inserting them into a mysql DB Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Stripping Movie Showtimes from a text file and inserting them into a mysql DB by planetscape (Chancellor) on Apr 08, 2006 at 17:05 UTC
FWIW, code shown above is from the O'Reilly book Yahoo! Hacks. planetscape	[reply]
Re: Stripping Movie Showtimes from a text file and inserting them into a mysql DB by McDarren (Abbot) on Apr 08, 2006 at 16:40 UTC
Is the usage 'theater_rss.pl <392>' or 'theater_rss.pl 392'? It would almost certainly be the latter. Strictly speaking, it should be "/path_to_script/script.pl parameters" So for example, if you have this script in /usr/local/bin, and you want to execute the script and pass 392 - you would type: `/usr/local/bin/theater_rss.pl 392` [download] Cheers, Darren :)	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Stripping Movie Showtimes from a text file and inserting them into a mysql DB by graff (Chancellor) on Apr 08, 2006 at 16:45 UTC
So, I gather you did not write this code yourself. Do you know whether the person who did write this code would approve of having it posted publicly here? Was there any sort of copyright or license statement that came with this code? That sort of thing really matters. As for the usage, it is conventional in describing command line syntax to use different brackets to indicate whether a given arg is mandatory or optional, and the intention is that the user should not include those brackets when actually typing a command line. So your command line should look like this: `theater_rss.pl 392` [download] i.e. without the angle brackets. (In fact, putting angle brackets on a command line usually means something special to the shell. If you don't know what that means, figure out what sort of shell you are using, and see if you can find a manual for how to use that shell. Look especially for "redirection".) As for step-by-step, it seems like the program code itself says pretty well what it is doing. After a successful run, you should be able to find relevant information in a file called "392.rss" in your current directory. (Oddly, it looks like the script will accept multiple theater-ids, and if the command line were `theater_rss.pl 392 393`, then there would appearently be a file called "392 393.rss" -- note the space between the numbers is part of the file name.)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Stripping Movie Showtimes from a text file and inserting them into a mysql DB by helphand (Pilgrim) on Apr 09, 2006 at 18:41 UTC
You won't get that script to work, Yahoo changed things on their side, the script will no longer work without extensive changes (url's changed and the parsing would require a complete rework). Scott	[reply]
Re: Stripping Movie Showtimes from a text file and inserting them into a mysql DB by Mingus Iamblichus (Initiate) on Apr 11, 2006 at 00:22 UTC
Thanx Scott & company!! since this code is no longer compatible with Yahoo..does anyone know another method i could use to get movie showtimes	[reply]