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dualityofone
12 May 2009, 09:46 AM
I am working on a page that gathers information to query and display it with PHP. For example: i want to display movies and movie times playing in a certain area. Is there a way to gain access to the database that sites like FANDANGO or Moviefone use to query that data. Along those lines, are there other public databases for this kind of information for read-only and web development purposes?

Alan
12 May 2009, 07:26 PM
Database servers are generally restricted to selected users as data integrity and consistancy is always an issue. I don't think you are going to find what you are looking for. I could be wrong.

Are you trying to cover just one area or multiple areas? If it's just one area, I would suggest just ringing the cinema and asking for a list of movies and times, if it's local you can pick up their leaflet yourself. Maybe they could email it to you on a weekly basis?

What you are trying to do is leach information off of another website. Unless they supply a gateway script into their database or provide you with a user account with read only priviledges, you may have to resort to reading the html code and taking what you need. I would imagine any website that gathers the information manually will be reluctant to share it with you for nothing.