Get IMDB ratings without any scraping

Update (20150712): If you know Python, check out the awesome IMDbPY library. It does the hard work for you, you just need to call some simple functions. Here is the docs.

Update (20130130): imdbapi.com seems to have moved to omdbapi.com. Links below are updated accordingly.

Problem
You want to get some data (e.g. rating) of a movie from IMDB. How to do it without any web scraping?

Solution #1
Someone made a simple API for this task, available at http://www.omdbapi.com/. You can search by ID or title.

Examples:

• search by ID: http://www.omdbapi.com/?i=tt0137523&t=
• search by title: http://www.omdbapi.com/?i=&t=fight+club

The result is a JSON string that contains basic movie info, rating included.

Solution #2
IMDB has a secret API too, made for mobile applications (available at http://app.imdb.com/). Here they say “For use only by clients authorized in writing by IMDb. Authors and users of unauthorized clients accept full legal exposure/liability for their actions.” So what comes below is strictly for educational purposes.

Examples:

• search by ID: http://app.imdb.com/title/maindetails?tconst=tt0137523
• search by title: http://app.imdb.com/find?api=v1&appid=iphone1&locale=en_US&q=fight+club

The result is a JSON string. Find more info about this API here.

Related posts

• Get the IMDB rating of a movie (via scraping)

_{Thanks reddit.}

Update (20120222)
Python code for solution #1 is here.

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