Subscribe to Movie Showtimes
With some quick scripting, subscribe to your favorite theaters to keep up with the movies they’re playing.
Even though there are a number of ways to keep up with ever-changing movie schedules at Yahoo! Movies [Hack #41] , if you already use an RSS newsreader, you can start watching your favorite theaters with just a bit of scripting.
RSS is an XML syndication format that’s great for keeping up with changing information—typically news stories—and Yahoo! offers RSS for many features of its site. You can add any data that’s available as RSS to a newsreader and see any changes or additions on a regular basis. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, Yahoo! doesn’t provide movie schedules via RSS, so if you want to see showtimes in your newsreader, you’ll need to build a feed yourself.
Finding Your Theaters
Yahoo! doesn’t offer movie schedules through their web services API, so this hack relies on screen scraping to gather the information. Screen scraping refers to downloading the HTML on the web site with a script and processing it to find relevant pieces of information. Keep in mind that screen scraping is a very brittle process, and if Yahoo! changes the HTML used to display movie times even slightly, the code in this hack will have to be modified to keep up with the changes.
To download the schedule page, you first need to know how to get there. Each theater listed at Yahoo! Movies has a unique internal ID number. But it’s fairly easy to find this ...
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