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If you need to scrape entertainment data from Rotten Tomatoes, we’ll walk through how to do this without violating their Terms of Service using a little-known technique involving HAR files. These allow us to record the data we want to scrape first, while we use Rotten Tomatoes in accordance with their Terms of Service, and we then scrape the data from the recording instead of the website.
1. Browse Rotten Tomatoes Data
Head to the Rotten Tomotoes Search Feature and jump to any category, search term or content you want to scrape the data for. You can use any filters you’d like as well. Once you see the content on the screen that you want to scrape, right click on the screen and hit “Inspect” to open developer tools and begin recording web traffic.
Now refresh the page to force Rotten Tomoatoes to re-send its initial data to your browser since you’re now recording. Then scroll down and browse through all the content, hitting the next button to load more and more results as needed while we’re capturing this data.
2. Export & Download
Once you’ve browsed through enough data, go to the “Network” tab in developer tools and click the down arrow labeled “Export HAR…” to download a HAR file containing the raw data that Rotten Tomatoes sent to our browser. Upload that file to the HAR File Web Scraper which will parse out the JSON data from Rotten Tomatoes into downloadable CSV files you can begin using in Excel or other spreadsheet programs right away for analysis or research.