rotten-reviews

Scrape audience reviews from Rotten Tomatoes 🍅

Description

This Node.js 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

All binaries are compiled using pkg using Node.js v8.12.0. See the releases page for the binaries' download links.

Example running the binaries on darwin:

$ ./rotten-reviews-macos
Usage: rotten-reviews [options] <showtype> <title> <pages>

scrapes audience movie reviews from rotten tomatoes

Options:
  --csv       exports to csv (defaults to json)
  -h, --help  output usage information

Running from global install (npm or yarn)

• Install package globally by running:

# install using npm
npm -g i rotten-reviews

# install using npm
yarn global add rotten-reviews

• Run rotten-reviews with the tv/m, movieSlug and pages parameter, for example:

$ rotten-reviews m venom_2018 25
[
  {
    "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!"
  },
  {
    "reviewer": "Andrew O",
    "date": "October 11, 2018",
    "stars": 2.5,
    "review": "Despite a surprising amount of humor and chemistry between Venom and his host, Venom is mostly inept as both an action and a horror film, with only the slightest amount of soul peering through the thoughtful characterization of Hardy's role. This is a movie you can enjoy while watching and forget the moment you're done."
  },
...

For tv shows, please specify the season e.g. rotten-reviews tv doctor_who/s11 25.

Running from package

• Install package by running:

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

• Example usage source code:

  // import the package
  const RottenReviews = require('rotten-reviews')
  
  // https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/venom_2018/reviews
  const movieSlug = 'venom_2018'
  const showType = 'm'
  
  // get 500 reviews (20 per page * 25)
  const pages = 25
  
  // get using the getAudienceReviews function
  RottenReviews.getAudienceReviews(showType, movieSlug, pages).then(reviews => {
    console.log(JSON.stringify(reviews, null, 4))
  })

• Here's the result of the source code above:

  [
      {
          "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!"
      },
      ...
  ]

Roadmap

• Scrape defined number of reviews instead of pages
• Error handling if movie page doesn't exist
• Include scraping TV series reviews

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