The Movie Database Support
Support → API Support
Fuzzier search for movie titles
posted by monkeypawzSTAFFMOD on June 7, 2019 at 5:36 AM
Hi,
First, let me start by saying a huge thank you to the team behind TMDB. It is a truly awesome resource. Thank you!
I am doing a small hobby project, where I take movie titles from a local cinema, and need to match them to TMDB using the search endpoint.
I am facing two challenges, that I feel are somewhat related - and I am hoping somebody has a good idea for me. :)
Example
Cinema lists: "Avengers: End Game (2D)"
- Challenge 1:
The 2D/3D throws the search off, so it cannot match (because obviously the movie title does NOT really 2d/3d. This is pretty easily resolved by me always removing 2d/3d from title, so easy enough to work around.
- Challenge 2: The title is not 100% accurate, notice space in end game/endgame:
Cinema: "Avengers: End Game" TMDB (and official): "Avengers: Endgame"
Question:
Is there a way to make the searches more "fuzzy", that would help with my above two challenges?
Reply by Travis Bell
on June 7, 2019 at 9:32 AM
Hi @monkeypawz,
There are no search options right now but search is a feature that is already on deck to get re-built. I have an open ticket here that you can vote for and follow.
Reply by monkeypawz
on June 7, 2019 at 10:24 AM
Thanks. :)
Reply by ScottyProgrammer
on June 11, 2019 at 3:19 AM
I had a similar issue, I mostly got it working by doing a Bing search in code using (http://www.bing.com/search?q= "IMDB" + move title) and parsing the Bing search results in code to get the corrected movie name I firstly tried google, but they obfuscate the results behind many layers so you cannot chop the result into better movie names.
This is open to different implementations of how you parse the Bing results, mainly look for the IMDB matches that are found with lots of tricky string manipulation
So if your up for the extra work you might firstly try searching on the movie name you have in the Movie DB search and if that doesn't get what you want then try the Bing search idea to get a better name and use it in the Movie DB search I know it is a lot of work and may break if Bing changes their page layout, etc, but worked quite well for me. I'm not even sure if it is legal to scrape Bing search results but you can.
happy coding