rotten-reviews

Scrape audience reviews from Rotten Tomatoes 🍅

Description

This Node.js package scrapes Rotten Tomatoes audience reviews pages and scrapes the contents by getting the reviewer name, date, total stars, and review excerpt.

Future features are listed on the roadmap.

Requirements

• Node.js

Usage

Running from binaries or global install

All binaries are compiled using pkg using Node.js v8.12.0. See the releases page for the binaries' download links. rotten-reviews can also be installed using npm or yarn globally by running:

# install using npm
npm -g i rotten-reviews

# install using yarn
yarn global add rotten-reviews

$ rotten-reviews
Usage: rotten-reviews [options] <title> <count>

Scrapes audience movie or tv show reviews from rotten tomatoes

Examples:
  rotten-reviews venom_2018 100
  rotten-reviews venom_2018 100 --csv
  rotten-reviews doctor_who/s11 10 --tv   (include the season # for tv shows)

Options:
  --csv       exports to csv (defaults to json)
  --tv        search as a tv show (defaults to movie)
  -h, --help  output usage information

Here's an example for scraping two Venom (2018) reviews:

$ rotten-reviews venom_2018 2
[
  {
    "reviewer": "Melissa B",
    "date": "October 11, 2018",
    "stars": 5,
    "review": "I loved it! Didn't expect to like it as much as I did.Some really funny parts and amazing action scenes. Ignore the critics, go see it!"
  },
  ...
]

Running from package

• Install package by running:

  # install using npm
  npm i rotten-reviews
  
  # install using yarn
  yarn add rotten-reviews

• Example usage source code:

  // import the package
  const RottenReviews = require('rotten-reviews')
  
  // https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/venom_2018
  //                                  ^^^^^^^^^^
  const movieSlug = 'venom_2018'
  
  // obtain 3 audience reviews
  const reviewCount = 3
  
  // determines whether is a tv show or not,
  // optional and defaults to false
  const isTV = false
  
  // scrapes the review pages and returns via promise
  RottenReviews.getAudienceReviews(movieSlug, reviewCount, isTV).then(
    reviews => {
      console.log(JSON.stringify(reviews, null, 3))
    }
  )

You can view more examples by opening the examples folder.

Roadmap

Version 1.1.0

• Scrape defined number of reviews instead of pages (#6)
• Error handling if movie page doesn't exist (#2)
• Include scraping TV series reviews (#8)

Credits

• axios for fetching webpages
• cheerio for scraping the webpage contents
• commander.js for running this package as a CLI app
• json2csv for converting scraped reviews to CSV on the CLI app
• pkg for compiling to binaries

License

MIT