zap2xml - a free zap2it scraper

[jdg]

To add to the growing list of xml tv listings, there is a free scraper for zap2it.com so it supports the same zap2it US and Canada cable/satellites.

http://zap2xml.110mb.com/

[drlava]

Interesting. Looks like right now it supports:

title
subtitle
description
category
date
episode-num
new ?
live ?

and not:
stereo
actor
director
rating
previously-shown
host
star-rating

just FYI, it's good to know as there are many options.

[jam_zhou]

Wow...this scraper is fast. It did 7 days of 70 channels in under a minute. I noticed that the command line is very similar to the xmltv command line. It worked really for me.

The big question however is whether it'll work in GBPVR, which I'll try out in the next few days. I don't have much time with a very active 1.5 year old running round. Thank goodness my GBPVR was stable enough before we had the little rug rat.

Cheers All.

Jam.z

[madcat]

i don't know about you, but for me it only creates one channel

Code:

<channel id="I.labs.zap2it.com">
    </channel>

and all programs on this channel. Any idea?

My bad, it was a cache thing - deleting their cache seems to fix it.

[skinnyguy]

Thanks, that works great, better than that yahoo tv xmltv thing!!

[Wakalaka]

Isn't this pointless since Zap2It is shutting down free service in September?

[whurlston]

They are shutting down the Data Direct feed. This pulls the data from the website which will still be around. It will have to be modified should they change the website structure (which I'm guessing will happen shortly after the Data Direct feed is shut down).

[jdg]

[QUOTE=drlava]Interesting. Looks like right now it supports:
....
and not:
....
[QUOTE]

The extra details could easily be scraped by getting the Program Detail .html from zap2it, but this adds 1 HTTP request per program. This could be too heavy of a burden for the servers (if enough people were doing it) and take a lot of time. Perhaps one could only get details for Movies or shows that contain a specific regex or certain channels, or...

I've 130 channels and a 10 day schedule (40,000 scheduled according to zap2xml's stats), so it would be too large of a burden to scrape a lot of additional Detail pages. It currently is very fast and simple and gets the info I really need.

The MSN MCE listings don't seem to fill in the Category field for the Canadian listings (even if you get each and every "Program Detail" JSON page) which is a major drawback for MSN MCE.

[tony1234]

Works well, but doesn't handle accentuated characters like é,ê etc.

[jdg]

Works well, but doesn't handle accentuated characters like é,ê etc.

In what field? In title/subtitle/desc those are converted to "é,ê"