Develop Reference

Retrieving information from google page

I'm thinking about making my first android app, It'd be about movies, I found an excellent data source, it is "http://www.google.com/movies?" but I wanted to know how could I extract this information and put it in my app,
I've searched but I don't know which is the optimal way to do this? does google have an API for this? is that what I want? is it better with the source code?what could I read or see to learn to do this?
thanks a lot guys, Is my first time as well programming retrieving information from the cloud,
cheers

Yup. Here is one way to do it.
First, you need to find the source of the SQL. The Yahoo Developer Console is a great place to look for this sort of stuff. It has EVERYTHING. The way these resources work is that you have a long link, like this....
developer.yahoo.com/blah/this . . . &q=KEYWORD_HERE+blah/ . . .
To access the information you are looking for, you stick whatever the correct keyword is where "KEYWORD_HERE" is, and the link will give you info in SQL format. I'll be doing the example as a stocks app.
First you create an Activity and define both sides of your link as strings. It'll look a bit like this:
public class InfoActivity extends Activity {
String firstHalf = "http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/blahblahblah&q=";
String secondHalf = "+blah/blah&blah . . . ";
Then, in your onCreate, you'll need to start an aSync task to do the actual pulling and parsing:
protected void onCreate(Bundle bundle) {
super.onCreate(bundle);
setContentView(R.id.layout_name);
final String yqlURL = firstHalf + KEYWORD_HERE + secondHalf;
new MyAsyncTask().execute(yqlURL);
}
Then to define our MrAsyncTask:
private class MyAsyncTask extends AsyncTask<String, String, String>{
protected String doInBackground(String... args) {
try {
URL url = new URL(args[0]);
URLConnection connection;
connection = url.openConnection();
HttpURLConnection httpConnection = (HttpURLConnection)connection;
int responseCode = httpConnection.getResponseCode();
// Tests if responseCode == 200 Good Connection
if (responseCode == HttpURLConnection.HTTP_OK) {
InputStream in = httpConnection.getInputStream();
DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
Document dom = db.parse(in);
Element docEle = dom.getDocumentElement();
NodeList nl = docEle.getElementsByTagName("nodeName1");
if (nl != null && nl.getLength() > 0) {
for (int i = 0 ; i < nl.getLength(); i++) {
//Parse the node here with getTextValue(n1, "Name of element")
//ex: String movieName = getTextValue(n1, "MovieName");
}
}
}
} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
Log.d(TAG, "MalformedURLException", e);
} catch (IOException e) {
Log.d(TAG, "IOException", e);
} catch (ParserConfigurationException e) {
Log.d(TAG, "Parser Configuration Exception", e);
} catch (SAXException e) {
Log.d(TAG, "SAX Exception", e);
}
finally {
}
return null;
}
I hope that gives you some idea of how to do this sort of thing. I'll go see if I can quickly spot a good resource on the yahoo apis to get the movie times at a certain location.
Good luck :) Let me know if you need anything clarified.
EDIT:
Looks like this is EXACTLY what you need (resource wise):
https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/?q=show%20tables&env=store://datatables.org/alltableswithkeys#h=select+*+from+google.igoogle.movies+where+movies%3D'68105'%3B
Check that out. Using that, your two halves of the link would be:
String firstHalf = "https://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20google.igoogle.movies%20where%20movies%3D'"
String secondHalf = "'%3B&env=store%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltableswithkeys"
And then to get your final link, you would just do
String yqlURL = firstHalf + "ZIP CODE OF YOUR LOCATION" + secondHalf;
And you would have all of the movies playing near you returned!

Make your life a lot easier and choose the api that is right for you. Choose one of these:
http://www.programmableweb.com/news/52-movies-apis-rovi-rotten-tomatoes-and-internet-video-archive/2013/01/22
Make your decision not only based on the content, but also ease of use and documentation. Documentation is a biggy.
Good luck!

well i would rather advice you to use an TheMovieDB.com API it is simple and provides every info of movies.

String.contains doing opposite Jsoup Android

I may be misunderstanding what String.contains does. I am now trying to pull a specific link using Jsoup in Android. I'm trying to just get the faceBook one as an example. Ive tried a few things. this one It Seems to be outputting got it on the ones that do not contain the facebook url and leaving the facebook ones blank. How do I just get the FaceBook ones and stop the loop.
protected Void doInBackground(Void... params) {
Document doc = null;
try {
doc = Jsoup.connect("http://www.homedepot.com").get();
Elements link = doc.select("a[href]");
String stringLink = null;
for (int i = 0; i < link.size(); i++) {
stringLink = link.toString();
if (stringLink.contains("https://www.facebook.com/")){
System.out.println(stringLink+"got it");
}
else{
//System.out.println(stringLink+"not it");
}
}
} catch (IOException e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
}
return null;
}
}

The following line is causing the problem:
stringLink = link.toString();
The link variable is a collection of Elements (in this case every link on the page), so by calling link.toString() you're getting the String representation of every single link on the page all at once! That means stringLink will always contain the facebook link!
Change the line to:
stringLink = link.get(i).toString();
This line gets only the link at index i on each iteration and checks whether or not it contains the facebook link.

Want regular expression for following?

I have:
<description><![CDATA[<div><b>Details:</b> <div class=ExternalClassCDAAC64F989B48B1AE79489DFBF8C27C><div><span style="font-size:8pt;font-weight:700"><font color="#008080" face=Verdana><span style="text-decoration:none"><a style="text-decoration:none" href="http://unipune.ac.in/other_academic_and_service_units/board_students_welfare/pdf/Annual_Essay_Competition_Covering_26-5-12.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#008080">Letter Regarding Annual Essay Prize Competition</font></a></span></font></span></div></div></div>
<div><b>Expires:</b> 8/14/2012</div>
]]></description>
I need a regular expression which will give me only the href contents. I tried with this:
String link1 = a.substring(a.indexOf("href=\""), a.indexOf("\""));
But its giving me a force close error.
The output that I want is somewhat like this:
link = http://unipune.ac.in/other_academic_and_service_units/board_students_welfare/pdf/Annual_Essay_Competition_Covering_26-5-12.pdf
Can anybody help me?

try this:::: but only if this original string will be in the same format.
String[] separated = a.spilt("href=\"");
String[] first = separated[1].spilt("\" target");
String link1 = first[0];

try this
\bhref="([^"<>]+)"
Code
try {
String resultString = subjectString.replaceAll("\\bhref=\"([^\"<>]+)\"", "link=$1");
} catch (PatternSyntaxException ex) {
// Syntax error in the regular expression
} catch (IllegalArgumentException ex) {
// Syntax error in the replacement text (unescaped $ signs?)
} catch (IndexOutOfBoundsException ex) {
// Non-existent backreference used the replacement text
}
Test it here.
Hope this helps.

Try this.
String link1 = a.substring(a.indexOf("href=\""), a.indexOf("target=")-1);

Need some explaining

So this is the weirdest thing ever to happen to me during programing. Yes I'm no pro at programing, but I'm learning as I go. I've got an app talking to a server, a socket in the main thread, reading is done in a separate class and thread and writing in a separate class with asynctask.
The problem is LocationManager. I could talk to server and write/read commands just fine, I implemented the LocationManager and its listener.
I then proceeded to implement a method to update my textview with the new coordinates on locatinChanged. So far so good. Thing is when I use the Emulator control in eclipse and send coordinates the app crashed with a stringOutOfBoundsException (I've programed for 3 years now never seen this). I looked at the code stepped through it and so on. Read the stacktrace, logcat, console and everywhere I could think of but it got me nowhere. Until I finally went to the readerthread which looks like this:
public class ReaderThread extends Thread {
public void run() {
new Thread(new Runnable(){
public void run(){
try {
//Establish a bufferedreader to read from the socket/server.
in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(socket.getInputStream()), 8 * 1024);
}
catch(Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); }
//As long as connect is true.
while (connected) {
String line;
try {
//Try to read a line from the reader.
line = in.readLine();
System.out.println(in.readLine());
if (in == null) {
//No one has sent a message yet.
System.out.println("No data recieved");
}
else {
int i = 0;
//As long as someone is sending messages.
while((line = in.readLine()) != null ){
//Make a new Message.
Message msg;
msg = new Message();
//Set the object to the input line.
msg.obj = line;
//Set an id so it can be identified in the main class and used in a switch.
msg.what = i;
System.out.println("i is: "+i);
//Send the message to the handler.
Main.this.h.sendMessage(msg);
}
}
}
catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println(e.getMessage());
}
}
}
}).start();
}
The variable i is in an if statement depending on what the server sent but I cut that out as it has nothing to do with this problem.
The problem is the freaking catch. When the catch is IOException, the app crashes. Out of dumb luck I changed this to Exception and printed e.message to catch the error and see what caused it. Thing is this change fixed it. How can switching IOException to just plain Exception fix a problem like this?
Its like with IOException the program says: "hey your not gonna catch the error but there is no error" but with Exception it says "Well now you could catch it so I'll proceed".
My app is working but I just can't grasp this, why and how does this happen?

You're essentially telling the application to catch the base Exception class. This means that any type of error will be caught, since all exception classes descend from that base type. Since StringOutOfBoundsException does not descend from IOException it was not being caught before and the error was not being caught. Instead of catching all exceptions, you might try the following:
try {
// Your code here...
} catch (IOException e) {
Log.e(TAG, "Caught an IOException!", e);
} catch (StringOutOfBoundsException e) {
Log.e(TAG, "Caught a string out of bounds Exception!", e);
}
I'm unable to determine what is actually throwing the StringOutOfBoundsException to begin with. It may be in the if statement that you cut out of your example.

while (connected) {
String line;
try {
//Try to read a line from the reader.
line = in.readLine();
System.out.println(in.readLine());
if (in == null) {
//No one has sent a message yet.
System.out.println("No data recieved");
}
The test for in == null is in a funny location. You should receive a NullPointerException if that test were to ever return true by nature of calling methods on it a few lines earlier. Obviously something is a little funny with this code.
You fail to save the return value from in.readLine() the second time you call it. I hope it did not contain anything useful. (Though, since you print the line, you obviously wanted to know what data it contained.)
Whatever that line was (from the first call to in.readLine()), it gets thrown away; there's nothing else in the loop that uses it before it is over-written on this line:
while((line = in.readLine()) != null ){
At this point, the two lines that you read are gone forever.
I'm not entirely sure what should be done to fix this; if it were me, I'd be sorely tempted to start over with a sheet of paper and sketch out what the method should be doing without looking at the existing code, then compare the sketch against the code to see which cases each one has overlooked.

android exception for validating file exist not working

I've been working with Eclipse ADT for about 2 months. In that time, I have a small utility that allows me to select an IP Address and Port, and then send a file to that combo. The utility works as intended, but when I type in the wrong file name, the application hangs.
#Override
public void run() {
if (data != null) {
this.send(data);
} else if (this.file != null) {
if (file.exists()) {
this.send(file);
} else {
transferError = new FileNotFoundException("The specified file could not be found");
}
}
}
I've even tried to do the following in hopes that one or the other would throw, but I am unsuccessful in both.
public void run() {
if (data != null) {
this.send(data);
} else if (this.file != null) {
if (file.exists()) {
this.send(file);
} else {
transferError = new FileNotFoundException("The specified file could not be found");
}
}try {
throw new Exception("blah blah blah");
} catch (Exception e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
I've jockeyed around the exception, I've added the one above, I've tried placing it in different places, and all unsuccessful. Again, I'm exceptionally new to this, and got here from basically mincing various tcp client codes. Aside of creating a way to throw the exception correctly, please help me understand why the first one isn't working and why the one you suggest is.

in your else block you aren't throwin the transferError you create.
throw transferError;
However you probably won't be able to do that because FileNotFoundException is a checked exception and the run() method doesn't declare any thrown exceptions. You probably need to find a different way to present the error to the user, like with a Toast or something.
Your second block doesn't work because you are catching the exception you throw.