Da Fonky Movie Script Parser
What is it for?
To parse movie scripts found online (in HTML) as JSON.
Indeed, movie scripts are always displayed in a certain format, but not in a way that would be intelligible for a computer program for later studies (stylometry, for instance).
The goal of this program is to create a JSON file from your movie script, differentiating the following types of text: character, speech, stage direction, and location.
Here are some movie scripts databases: http://www.imsdb.com , http://www.script-o-rama.com/table.shtml , ... go find your own...
Why did you do this?
My friend Pierre Peigné-Leroy needed to parse movie scripts to make some stylometry on it, as part of his Master Thesis in Philosophy. With a good dataset, a lot can be observed by looking only at the text of our cult movies!
How can I use it?
You need python3, and some python packages (I use pip3 to install plugin, but conda or anything else is fine too).
Needed python packages: argparse, urllib, bs4, re
Then, you'll need to get my project and launch it. Most of it is interactive, then.
Instructions for Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install -Y python3 python3-pip git
sudo pip3 install argparse urllib bs4 re
git clone https://github.com/Adrien-Luxey/Da-Fonky-Movie-Script-Parser.git
cd Da-Fonky-Movie-Script-Parser
chmod +x json_querier.py movie_script_parser.py
./movie_script_parser.py
# Follow my interactive lead
./json_querier.py
# Follow instructions again (please)
How does it work?
Parsing
First of all, we try to find the movie script in the given page. In essence, we look for the first <pre> tag, since movie scripts are most often located inside this DOM element.
Once we went through the introduction, we count the number of leading spaces at each line, ask the user for this line's type, and assume that all others lines with this amount of leading spaces must be of the same type. It is a big assumption, but it seems to work nicely most of the time.
Active learning, baby!
Reading the JSON file
This part is fairly intuitive, just follow the interactive instructions.
Contributions welcome etc etc.
No licence at the moment, but I hereby declare that you can use, modify and sell my script if you feel like it.
Adrien