[ronie]

Though it does beg the question as to why they are parsing JSON with a regex? Don't get me wrong, I love using regexes, but when parsing results from an API that is being updated regularly? Probably not a good idea.

JSON should *NOT* depend on order, but it seems that the historical scraper xml uses regex, which is not good for this. I don't want to be all "do this do that" but I definitely agree, an actual JSON parser in the scraper code would be awesome. I could help somewhere if I need be. I didn't get my BSCS for nothing dammit!

it's a relic from the old days, when only a few sites were available (imdb and the likes) that provided metadata info.
none of those had an api, so we had to scrape the website itself.

there's been talk (but no more than that at this point) to rewrite the scraping system and allow for python based scrapers
instead of the xml parsers we have now.