Andy, The only problem with the search on iPlayer is that it's just too good. If you try "Comedy" as a search term, it takes you directly to the "Category: Comedy" page, for example.
The only problem is that the results, even if scraped still don't have enough information to sort them into the "newest" order, which is the sort of thing that you would probably want in a little gadget for a webpage. You can always, by the way, use: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/<PID> (eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b008pbnv ) to get the information for a programme's PID, but you don't seem to be able to use the .xml extension to get the information as XML... yet I presume. 2008/8/26 Andy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Brian Butterworth wrote: > > I think you are right about the "search results", I was going to make a > > iPlayer search gadget, so you could create say a "Doctor Who" one for a > > fan site, or do a "Stephen Fry" one for his, would seem a great little > > marketing gadget for the iPlayer.. > > You could "screen scrape" the search page. I wrote some code to do this > back when I was thinking of trying to get iPlayer running on an Android > Phone (I gave up after realising I set my targets a little high!). > > Helpfully the code I wrote is now broken, but has been partially fixed > (yay). Oddly the program used to fetch data from > http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/metafiles/episode/[PID].xml<http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/metafiles/episode/%5BPID%5D.xml>but > that > returns a 404 now, any ideas what's changed? > > You can get the list of PIDs returned by a search using a few simple > REGEXs, the only thing you have to be careful about is when results are > split across pages. > > Andy > - > Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please > visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. > Unofficial list archive: > http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ > -- Brian Butterworth http://www.ukfree.tv - independent digital television and switchover advice, since 2002
