  What's IMDbPY?
  ==============

NOTE: see also the recommendations in the "DISCLAIMER.txt" file.


IMDbPY is a Python package useful to retrieve and manage the data of
the IMDb movie database.

IMDbPY is mainly a tool intended for programmers and developers, but
some example scripts are included.

If you're a poor, simple, clueless user, read the "README.users" file. :-)
Seriously: take a look at the provided example scripts even if you're
a Really Mighty Programmer(tm), they should clearly show how to use IMDbPY.

If you want to develop a program/script/package/framework using the
IMDbPY package, see the "README.package" file, for instructions about
how to use this package.

If you're crazy enough and/or you've realized that your higher
inspiration in life is to help the development of IMDbPY, begin reading
the "README.devel" file. ;-)


  INSTALLATION
  ============

Everything you need to do is to run, as the root user, the command:
    # python setup.py install

If, for some reason, it doesn't work, you can copy the "./imdb"
directory in the local site-packages directory of the python
major version you're using.
To know what major version of python you've installed, run:
    $ python -V

It should return a string like "Python 2.2.1"; in this example
the major version is "2.2".
Now copy the "./imdb" directory:
    # cp -r ./imdb /usr/local/lib/python{MAJORVERSION}/site-packages/


  FEATURES
  ========

So far you can search for a movie with a given title or a person
with a given name, and retrieve information for a given movie or person;
the supported data access systems are 'http' (i.e.: the data are fetched
through the IMDb's web server http://akas.imdb.com) and 'local',
meaning that the data are taken from the plain text data files;
see http://www.imdb.com/interfaces.html for more information.



  FEATURE OF THE HTTP DATA ACCESS SYSTEM
  ======================================

* Returns almost every available information about a movie or person.
* The use of the "akas" server will provide access to a lot of
  AKA titles in many languages, so it's really useful if English is
  not your native language.
* You can set/use a proxy to access the web; if set, the HTTP_PROXY
  environment variable will be automatically used, otherwise you can set a
  proxy with the set_proxy() method of the class returned by the
  imdb.IMDb function; obviously this method is available only for the http
  data access system, since it's defined in the IMDbHTTPAccessSystem class
  of the parser.http package.
  Example:
      from imdb import IMDb
      i = IMDb(accessSystem='http') # the accessSystem argument is not really
                            # needed, since "http" is the default.
      i.set_proxy('http://localhost:8080/')

  You can force a direct connection to the net setting the proxy
  to a null value (i.e.: i.set_proxy('')).


  FEATURE OF THE LOCAL DATA ACCESS SYSTEM
  =======================================

* Retrieve almost every information available, in a decently short time.


