I have always been a movie buff. I like a lot of different styles, I like to go from a 60's western to a 2010's musical. However, I have one big drawback:
I have a hard time remembering the films I've seen, their themes and characteristics. This has led me several times to start a movie, happy to discover a new work, and to realize after 30 min that I had already seen it (although I still don't remember the ending...). It's a pretty unpleasant feeling, so I thought I'd do something about it:
I started keeping a log of all the movies I had seen. At first, I started by filling it with the movies I remembered, it took me a few months to complete. Finally, every time I watched a movie, I added it to my list to keep it in memory.
As I went along, I added different characteristics to fill in for each film: French title, director, screenwriter, actors etc... In addition to remembering the films I've seen, it also forces me to research the films I discover, to be interested in the people who produce them.
I started to get the hang of it, and even after a few weeks of use, I wanted to add features to each movie, like the "Quebec Title". However, I had at that time about 400 movies already listed in my excel, and I couldn't see myself doing a search by hand for each movie... I used a little of web scraping.
I actually used the python library Wikipedia which allows, among other things, to do automated searches on wikipedia and return the source code of the article page corresponding to the search terms. It is then possible to extract the searched information.
import wikipedia
I then used the library xlrd and xlwd (read et write) to retrieve each movie name from my excel file, use them to do the wikipedia searches, then enter the new information found in the excel file. In a few minutes, all 400 movies were processed./p>
import xlrd
import xlwd
Finally, when I was satisfied with the features of the movies, I wanted to try to train my memory a little more.
So I created a quiz in python based on the excel I had just obtained:
- the program gives me a movie title, I have to give it the director
- it gives me the title, I give it the release date
- it gives me the director, and I give it the title,
and many others.
I also associated each type of question with a given probability of occurrence in order to prioritize the types of questions I wanted.
