Searching for local movie listings
For local movie listings, we're moving away from YQL and using Google's movie listing service. You just text "movies" and it will return local movie listings, what time they are playing, and the theatre where it is being screened.
There isn't actually a good API system for looking up movies, so this is kind of a hybrid lookup system that will actually read the content of a web page and return the movie listings.
Scraping , which is what we call this type of lookup, has ups and downs. The upside is that it lets us grab information from web sites that we normally wouldn't be able to get by any other way; however, the downside is that, if the web site changes in any way, the lookup can be broken.
Getting ready
The complete source code for this recipe can be found in the Chapter5/
folder.
How to do it...
Who wants to go to the movies? This recipe will extend our local search system even further with a handy movie listing.
Download the Simple HTML Dom library from...