The Movie Database Support
Support → API Support
Getting a list of all actors whose names satisfy a particular constraint
posted by horwitzSTAFFMOD on June 28, 2020 at 5:38 AM
Is there a way—without needing to make millions(!) of queries—to get a list of the ids of all actors/actresses whose names contain each of A, E, I, O, and U exactly once (in any order)—e.g., 1204 (the id for Julia Roberts)?
Technically one could call
https://api.themoviedb.org/3/person/latest?api_key=5555555&language=en-US
and extract the value from the response's "id" field—call this value latest—and then iterate a value i from 1 to latest and for each call
https://api.themoviedb.org/3/person/i?api_key=5555555&language=en-US
checking the "name" value (and "also_known_as" values) on the client side to see if each of A, E, I, O, and U occur exactly once (in any one of those values)... but that looks like it'd take over 2 million HTTP calls, which is... intractable.
I'd certainly appreciate any suggestions for solutions that are actually feasible—thanks!
Reply by Travis Bell
on June 28, 2020 at 11:54 AM
Hi @horwitz,
Unfortunately, there is no API implementation to suit your needs. You would have to bring the data down locally and do this on your end.
If you are only interested in names, you could use the daily ID export. It contains a list of all of the people in TMDb.
Reply by horwitz
on June 28, 2020 at 4:39 PM
The exports look to be very helpful—thanks! (And thanks for the quick response!)