Question

What I’m trying to do is parse & extract the movies title, without all the HTML gunk, from the webpage which will eventually get saved into a spreadsheet. My code:

function myFunction() {
   var url = UrlFetchApp.fetch("http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=clashofthetitans2.htm")
   var doc = url.getContentText()
   var patt1 = doc.match(/<font face\=\"Verdana\"\ssize\=\"6\"><b>.*?<\/b>/i);

      //var cleaned = patt1.replace(/^<font face\=\"Verdana\" size\=\"6\"><b>/,"");
      //Logger.log(cleaned); Didn't work, get "cannot find function in object" error.
      //so tried making a function below:   

   String.trim = function() {
     return this.replace(/^\W<font face\=\"Verdana\"\ssize\=\"6\"><b>/,""); }
   Logger.log(patt1.trim());
 }

I’m very new to all of this (programming and GoogleScripting in general) I’ve been referencing w3school.com’s JavaScript section but many things on there just don’t work with Google Scripts. I’m just not sure what’s missing here, is my RegEx wrong? Is there a better/faster way to extract this data instead of RegEx? Any help would be great, Thanks for reading!

Answer 1

While trying to parse information out of HTML that’s not under your control is always a bit of a challenge, there is a way you could make this easier on yourself.

I noticed that the title element of each movie page also contains the movie title, like this:

<title>Wrath of the Titans (2012) - Box Office Mojo</title>

You might have more success parsing the title out of this, as it is probably more stable.

var url = UrlFetchApp.fetch("http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=clashofthetitans2.htm");
var doc = url.getContentText();
var match = content.match(/<title>(.+) \([0-9]{4}\) -/);
Logger.log("Movie title is " + match[1]);