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So I know this question is kind of vague, but I have done a ton of research and this is kind of my only option left.

For a course in my bachelor's degree, we're working with cordova. The entire grade is to make an app, using at least one API and plugin. I want to make an app that displays information about movies, using the TMDb and Open movie database API's. For movies that are in cinema's right now, I'd like to display the showtimes at a cinema.

I've found several cinema API's, but none of them are free, which means I can't use them. But I was thinking, if you type into google: "movie name" "cinema name" it displays the showtimes of that movie in one of those handy little cards, like this:

google movie showtime example

Now I'm wondering, is there any possible way I could maybe embed this into my app? Like, I'd be on the page of a certain movie, and then I'd have the user type in the name of a cinema, I'd look that up in google and then display one of these cards?

Or is the only possible way to do this to just open a browser? Which would of course be a lot less impressive looking.

Wim Naudts
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I found something that might be of interest to you in another question:

Is there a movie showtime api?

nematoth
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    Hey, I had already looked at this post, but all of these api's have been discontinued, as has movies.google.com. But I read the first answer more indept now and it seems like he's actually just looking up the data on google and then grabbing the results by looking at the google codebehind and using their classes and id's? Or am I nog understanding that right? If it is what he is doing, then how is that method called? I'd love to do some reading on it to understand how I can do this, I just have never heard of something like that before. I did find something about "parsing html" on another post – Wim Naudts Feb 28 '18 at 09:54
  • Yeah, that's right.. they are "scraping" the content essentially. It's messy but it works. (although not legal and can lead to your website being blacklisted etc). – nematoth Feb 28 '18 at 09:59
  • So do you know how this method is called? Or is "parsing html" the right name? – Wim Naudts Feb 28 '18 at 10:12
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This is the main API provider for movietimes and they do provide a free trial for 30 days.

https://www.internationalshowtimes.com/

It might be worthwhile doing it the "right" way using this API. If you need it for longer than 30 days , sometimes it worth paying a little for something professional even though it's for a school project. It will really impress that you are using real world API's.

nematoth
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  • I'd found that one too, it looks really cool! But my project spans longer than 30 days and with the lowest prices at €149 per month it's not really viable. Anyway, I'll look into it! – Wim Naudts Feb 28 '18 at 10:11