The Movie Database Support
Support → API Support
Search API for specific movie name
posted by Lighthouse50STAFFMOD on February 12, 2017 at 8:19 AM
Hi, I just joined The Movie Database.
I understand I can search by a movie title, like this:
https://api.themoviedb.org/3/search/movie?api_key=###&query=red
However, it brings up multiple movies (Red, Rojo, Rood e.g).
How can I literally just get information about a movie which matches the exact query? (In this case, Red).
Cheers.
Reply by Travis Bell
on February 12, 2017 at 11:49 AM
Hi @Lighthouse50 Welcome!
You can't. Search is designed to be pretty good about showing the best match first but it won't always get it right. One way to help would be to add a year (if you know it) otherwise it's more of a fuzzy search.
Reply by Lighthouse50
on February 12, 2017 at 12:16 PM
Hi Travis,
What do you mean by fuzzy search? The movie name in the query will always be correct (not like enter part of the movie name). Are you sure there's no way to literally only display if it matches the exact query?
Reply by Travis Bell
on February 12, 2017 at 12:24 PM
It's an ngram search from the start of a title. The website user the API so you can see exactly how it works by testing it here.
I do not have any logic built to accommodate exact searching.
Reply by Playpilot
on February 14, 2017 at 11:32 AM
@Lighthouse50 ; an idea: You can always iterate the results and check for exact title matches on the client side.
Reply by TanyaPrinzesss
on November 30, 2023 at 4:22 PM
I know this is really old., but I made an NPM to help with this... https://www.npmjs.com/package/identify-media, you feed it the filename with year and everything else in it and it tries to identify what is movie, what is release year, and what is "other" (info like director's cut, or extended, etc.) and what can be ignored. It works pretty well. I have also added functions to search opensubtitles with hash...