BBC iPlayer alerter – Part 1: JSON processing

As I am unable to read during my morning commute, I have taken to listening to audiobooks to fill the time usefully.

A great source of material to listen to are the shows on BBC Radio 4 Extra. I have a technique for getting the iPlayer content onto my generic mp3 player, but I found trawling through the lists of upcoming programmes to earmark those I wanted to watch rather laborious. 

To automate this process, I wanted to get an email on a weekly basis telling me of new upcoming shows. I would then just need to read through the handful of new shows that had been added, as opposed to the entire list. The only computer that I keep on all the time is my Raspberry Pi, so I decided a Python script run using a weekly cron job would meet the case.

I split the problem into 3 basic steps (hence splitting the posts for the project into 3 parts):

1. Automatically read all the current shows
2. Compare the list of current shows to those of last week
3. Send an email of the newly detected shows to me

To accomplish point number 1, I discovered that the main list of shows I browsed regularly (Drama) was available in JSON format by appending .json to the url: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4extra/programmes/genres/drama/current.json

Resulting in the raw information about all the current shows. A small sample is below:

{"type":"series","pid":"b01pvbbs","title":"David Constantine - Tea at the Midland","short_synopsis":"Short stories from one of the London Evening Standard's Books of the Year 2012.","image":{"filename":"tea-at-the-midland_midland-hotel-morecambe_140113_s_get.jpg"},"is_available":true},{"type":"series","pid":"b00yjr30","title":"Dick Francis - Dead on Red","short_synopsis":"Simmering resentment brings a high class hit-man over from France to target a jockey","image":{"filename":"dick_francins_dead_on_red_0211_s_get.jpg"},"is_available":true},{"type":"brand","pid":"b01ms5v9","title":"Dickens Confidential","short_synopsis":"Before writing his novels, Charles Dickens worked as editor on a newspaper...","is_available":true}

The next thing to do was to process this using a Python script.

Here is the first test:

#!/usr/bin/python

from urllib import request
import json
url = "http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4extra/programmes/genres/drama/current.json"
response = request.urlopen(url)

encoding = response.headers.get_content_charset()
json_object = json.loads(response.read().decode('utf-8'))

programmes = json_object['category_slice']['programmes']

for program in programmes:
print (program['title'])
print (program['short_synopsis'])

At this stage, the titles and details of the radio shows are printed on the screen.

I will tackle the use and storage of this data in the next post.