IMDb Watchlist Scraper

Overview

This library provides a WatchlistScraper class for scraping IMDb watchlist data, including rating IDs and usernames, using the IMDb user ID.

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Class Initialization

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- userId _(string, required)_:
IMDb user ID string, formatted like 'ur125655832'.

- headless _(boolean, optional)_:
Default: true.
Determines whether the browser runs in headless mode. Set to false for testing purposes.

- timeoutInMs _(number, optional)_:
Default: 3 minutes (180000 ms).
The script timeout duration. If a timeout occurs, the watchlistGrabIds() function will console.error() and return null.

- userAgent _(string, optional)_:
Default:
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36".
Refer to Playwright documentation for user agent formatting details.
This is used in Playwright's browser.newContext()

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Usage

$3

$3

watchlistGrabIds() opens a playwright browser, navigates to the watchlist and scrapes all of the IDs in that watchlist.

$3

On success, the function returns an object:

``javascript
{
idArr: string[], // Array of rating IDs
username: string | null // IMDb username, or null if unavailable
}
`

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The function throws an error explicitly in the following cases:

1. The target watchlist is privated
2. Parsing time exceeds the time set in timeoutInMs
3. Parsing completes but the returned idArr is empty

Example

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`javascript
const scraper = new WatchlistScraper({ userId: "ur125655832" });

try {
const scrapingResults = await scraper.watchlistGrabIds();

// username can be null
const username = scrapingResults.username;
if (!!username) {
console.log(username);
}

// this is never null and always has at least 1 element
const idArr = scrapingResults.idArr;
console.log(idArr);
} catch (error) {
// handle error
}
``