No longer maintained - Moviefone changed their format
Bootleg represents my playground for scraping movies from moviefone.com
To gain access to the gem simply:
require 'bootleg'
Currently Bootleg supports search for movies and theaters within a certain zipcode.
agent = Bootleg::Agent.new(zipcode: 20851)
The bootleg agent is responsible for initializing the enviornment and providing
a simple method page that gives us access to the first search results.
page = agent.page
A page has two handy methods. The theaters method gives you an array with
all the available theaters. You have access to a theater's title, link, price
for an adult or the price for a child as well as the address of the theater and
the movies that are currently palying at that theater. The page also has a
next method that give you access to the next page. You can keep navigating
through the search results until page.next returns Last Page.
page = page.next
Within theaters you also have access to movies. A movie has attributes for title link and showtimes.
theaters = page.theaters
This gives you a list of theaters on the current page.
For example if you would like access to all the movies that run in a certain theater you could do the following.
theaters.first.movies
If you need to scrape additional information from either theaters or movies it is fairly easy to extend either the theater class or the movies class.
Some of the main improvements this gem could use is better error support for different edge cases. The gem could also benefit from more tests to ilustrate some of the patterns identified while scrapping movies and theaters.