API or any other way to access IMDB TOP 250 list?

vivek_jonam picture vivek_jonam · Jul 27, 2012 · Viewed 9.8k times · Source

I have done extensive research and found that I couldn't find an API. Is there any available API to get the TOP 250 list?

Or another way to get access to the list?

I tried accessing the page HTML and parsing in my JSP backend. But the problem here is that I get only a skeleton, the list loads as AJAX.

Any way of web scraping it?

Any usage Idea would be appreciated...

Answer

David Chappelle picture David Chappelle · Mar 21, 2013

The easiest way is to just download the data from the IMDb alternate interfaces.

The file you want is ratings.list.gz. The Top 250 films are listed in the first section.