blittan Wrote:what would be the advantage with a python scraper? just curious
To some, writing code is more natural than trying to put everything into a series of regexes constrained by that language (even in cases where equivalent power is being used).
There's a good consistency argument too: plugins are Python, while in theory it might have been possible to do them with XML too (although they'd be more limited). Why invent a new language for scrapers? I don't think "ease of use" is a good answer, because a Python template would be as easy or easier to manipulate as the current XML format.
Matching XML (or HTML) with regular expressions seems a little unsafe, although since it seems to be working so far with many sites that's more academic than a real issue.
There are also things the scraper language can't do, of course. As an example - and perhaps this is possible in the scraper language - I noticed that a couple of my movies were matched with TV show episodes of the same name, even though TMDB explicitly calls them out as episodes; I'd prefer matching movies be selected first, falling back to episodes if there are no movies in the list.
And perhaps this goes against the idea of the ability to run scrapers in the background - it might work better as a script - but for some movies I'd like to be able to select an alternate poster than the first one, or even select among the matched items if they're close.