Letterboxd-list-scraper

A tool for scraping Letterboxd lists from a simple URL. The output is a file with film titles, release year, director, cast, owner rating, average rating and a whole lot more (see example CSVs and JSONs in /example_output/).

Version v2.1.0 supports the scraping of:

• Lists (e.g. https://letterboxd.com/bjornbork/list/het-huis-anubis/)
• Watchlists (e.g. https://letterboxd.com/joelhaver/watchlist/)
• User films (e.g. https://letterboxd.com/mscorsese/films/)
• Generic Letterboxd films (e.g. https://letterboxd.com/films/popular/this/week/genre/documentary/)

The current scrape rate is about 1.2 films per second. Multiple lists can be concurrently scraped using separate CPU threads (default max of 4 threads, but this is configurable).

Getting Started

Dependencies

Requires Python 3.x, numpy, BeautifulSoup (bs4), requests, tqdm and lxml.

If dependencies are not met it is recommended to install everything needed in one go using pip install -r requirements.txt (ideally in a clean virtual environment).

Installing

• Clone the repository and work in there.

Executing program

• Execute the program by running python -m listscraper [options] [list-url] on the command line in the project directory.

  Multiple list URLs can be provided, separated by a space. The output file(s) can then be found in the folder /scraper_outputs/, which will be created if not already present. Some of the optional flags are:

  • -p or --pages can be used to select specific pages.
  • -on or --output-name can be used to give the output file(s) a user-specified name.
  • -f or --file can be used to import a .txt file with multiple list URLs that should be scraped.
  • -op or --output-path can be used to write the output file(s) to a desired directory.
  • -ofe or --output-file-extension can be used to specify what type of file is outputted (support for CSV and json).
  • --concat will concatenate all films of the given lists and output them in a single file.

Note

Please use python -m listscraper --help for a full list of all available flags including extensive descriptions on how to use them.

Tip

Scraping multiple lists is most easily done by running python -m listscraper -f <file> with a custom .txt file that contains the URL on each newline. Each newline can take unique -p and -on optional flags. For an example of such a file please see target_lists.txt.

Important

Program currently does not support the scraping of extremely long generic Letterboxd pages (e.g. https://letterboxd.com/films/popular/this/week/genre/documentary/, which contains ~152000 films). To circumvent this, please use the -p flag to make a smaller page selection.

TODO

• Add further options for output, currently supports CSV and json.
• Add scrape functionality for user top 4 and diary.
• Add -u <username> flag that scrapes the diary, top 4, films and lists of a single user.
• Add a --meta-data flag to print original list name, scrape date, username above CSV header.
• Optimize thread usage to increase scrape speed.

Authors

Arno Lafontaine

Acknowledgments

Thanks to BBotml for the inspiration for this project https://github.com/BBottoml/Letterboxd-friend-ranker.