Boxee App with Website Parsing in Javascript?

**Alexandr3** · December 6th, 2010, 07:53 PM

Hi,

I'm a web developer and I want to know if it's possible to create a Boxee app that will parse a website to retrieve show and episodes info in JavaScript?

I know it can be done in Python, but not being very good with it, I was wondering if there was another way to do it.

Thanks!

**Fuzzgtp** · December 6th, 2010, 09:01 PM

either way you will end up using python at some point. Not to familiar with js, but if you had it somewhere on a server that parsed it and put up xml would be the easiest.

**Alexandr3** · December 6th, 2010, 09:13 PM

Originally Posted by Fuzzgtp

either way you will end up using python at some point. Not to familiar with js, but if you had it somewhere on a server that parsed it and put up xml would be the easiest.

Ok so it could be PHP? Any tutorial on this?

**DPK** · December 7th, 2010, 05:29 AM

Originally Posted by Alexandr3

Ok so it could be PHP? Any tutorial on this?

Boxee apps themselves either have to be coded in Python or skinless apps that use RSS feeds. You can use PHP on a remote server to generate an RSS feed and pull that into a Boxee app if you want, but you can't use PHP to code a Boxee app.

Hope that clarifies. In the end you will eventually hit the Python wall.

**pahtz** · December 7th, 2010, 06:34 AM

You can use Google's AppEngine to serve your parser/scraper. It's free for up to a few million hits a month.

You will have to use Java or Python but parsing code is fairly simple, it's mostly print statements and regular expressions. For the regex I just use this website to generate the code: http://txt2re.com/

See my source code in this post: http://forums.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=23293

**Alexandr3** · December 7th, 2010, 07:07 AM

Originally Posted by DPK

You can use PHP on a remote server to generate an RSS feed and pull that into a Boxee app if you want..

That's interesting and I understand it's used for content that gets updated chronologically (after all its an RSS feed).

But is it adapted to a tv show/episode format where the data has to be scrapped regularly and the shows are alphabetically sorted?

Originally Posted by pahtz

You can use Google's AppEngine to serve your parser/scraper. It's free for up to a few million hits a month.

You will have to use Java or Python but parsing code is fairly simple, it's mostly print statements and regular expressions. For the regex I just use this website to generate the code: http://txt2re.com/

See my source code in this post: http://forums.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=23293

Thanks for these resources!