Proof-of-concept scraper for iPlayer web frontend TV data to JSON

[dinkypumpkin]

On 01/11/2014 02:01, Steven Maude wrote:
> Finally, Rob's suggestion in this thread of using BBC search is a great
> one. It means you don't need to scrape the whole thing, though you'd
> have a short, acceptable wait for each search to run; that might be the
> way to go, unless there are compelling reasons to retrieve a complete feed.

Externalizing the search function seems like a good idea.  Up to now the 
iPlayer site search was pretty crude compared to get_iplayer, but that 
advantage has been eroded.  Once you can no longer do better searches, 
there isn't much point in keeping a local cache, and get_iplayer is just 
about at that point.  It's a little unfortunate to have to parse a big 
glob of HTML to get search results, but as you've seen, most of it is 
chaff anyway.  Nothing would please me more than whacking big chunks out 
of get_iplayer.