Python 3 Code for scraping movie details from fandango.com

fandango.py

from lxml import html, etree
import datetime
import requests
import re
import os
import sys
import unicodecsv as csv
import argparse
import json
# from exceptions import ValueError

def parse(location, showdate):
	print("Fetching Locations..")
	searchedLocation = location
	searchedDate = showdate
	movie_listings = []

	# Cookies for searching theater location
	cookie = {
		'akamai_generated_location': '{"zip":"""","city":"CLIFTON","state":"NJ","county":"PASSAIC","areacode":"""","lat":"40.8800","long":"-74.1446","countrycode":""""}'
	}
	# Headers to get location details from their auto complete query
	location_headers = {
		'referer': 'https://www.fandango.com/',
		'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/63.0.3239.84 Safari/537.36',
		'x-requested-with': 'XMLHttpRequest'
	}
	# Location autocomplete API endpoint
	location_url = 'https://www.fandango.com/napi/home/autocompleteDesktopSearch/' + searchedLocation
	data = {
		'zipCode': '',
		'city': '',
		'state': '',
		'date': str(searchedDate),
		'page': 1,
		'favTheaterOnly': False,
		'limit': 30,
		'offset': 0,
		'isdesktop': True
	}
	# Retrieving available locations
	location_response = requests.get(location_url, cookies=cookie, headers=location_headers).json()
	locations = location_response.get('resultsByType',{}).get('locations',{}).get('items',{})

	if locations:
		# Selecting first location from available locations
		searched_location = locations[0]
		searched_location_url = searched_location.get('link')
		location_name = searched_location.get('name')
		state = searched_location.get('state')
		# Getting city from location name, city is necessary to get theater lists if you are passing location as input
		city = location_name.split(',')[0].strip() if ',' in location_name else None

		if city and state:
			data['city'] = city
			data['state'] = state
		else:
			# city,state is not necessary if you are passing zipcode as input
			data['zipCode'] = location_name

		# Headers for getting theater listing for the searched location
		theater_headers = {
			'accept': '*/*',
			'accept-encoding': 'gzip, deflate, br',
			'accept-language': 'en-US,en;q=0.9,ml;q=0.8',
			'referer': searched_location_url,
			'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/62.0.3202.75 Safari/537.36',
			'x-requested-with': 'XMLHttpRequest'
		}
		movie_url = 'https://www.fandango.com/napi/theaterswithshowtimes'

		# Fetching Movie details for search location
		print("Fetching movie details")
		try:
			movie_response = requests.get(movie_url, params=data, headers=location_headers).json()
		except:
			print("Failed to get movie details")

		all_theaters = movie_response.get('theaters')
		if all_theaters:
			# Iterating through each each theater
			for theater in all_theaters:
				theater_name = theater.get('name')
				address = theater.get('address1')
				city = theater.get('city')
				state = theater.get('state')
				zipcode = theater.get('zip')
				theater_address = address + ' ' + city + ' ' + state + ' ' + zipcode
				all_movies = theater.get('movies')
				# Iterating through each movie in a thaater
				if all_movies:
					for movie in all_movies:
						# cleaning data
						movie_name = movie.get('title').strip()
						duration = str(movie.get('runtime'))
						genre = ','.join(' '.join(movie.get('genres')).split()).strip()
						movie_rating = movie.get('rating')
						star_rating = str(movie['stars']['totalRating']
										  ['stars']['points']).strip()

						movie_data = {
							"Theatre_Name": theater_name,
							"Theatre_Address": theater_address,
							"Movie_Name": movie_name,
							"Show_Date": searchedDate,
							"Movie_Rating": movie_rating,
							"Star_Rating": star_rating,
							"Duration": duration,
							"Genre": genre,
							"Location_or_Zipcode": searchedLocation
						}
						movie_listings.append(movie_data)
				else:
					print("No movies in %s"%(theater_name))

			return movie_listings

		else:
			print("No theaters found")
	else:
		print("No location found")

if __name__ == "__main__":

	''' eg-:python fandango.py 20001 2017-12-31 '''

	argparser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
	argparser.add_argument('location', help='theater location (zipcode or city+state)', type=str)
	argparser.add_argument('showdate', help='movie show time', type=str)
	args = argparser.parse_args()
	location = args.location
	showdate = args.showdate
	validdate = False

	try:
		datetime.datetime.strptime(showdate, '%Y-%m-%d')
		validdate =True

	except ValueError:
		print("Invalid showdate, showdate should be YYYY-MM-DD format")

	if validdate:
		searchdate = datetime.datetime.strptime(showdate, '%Y-%m-%d').date()
		today = str(datetime.datetime.today().strftime('%Y-%m-%d'))
		datenow = datetime.datetime.strptime(today,'%Y-%m-%d').date()

		if searchdate >= datenow:
			scraped_data = parse(location, showdate)

			if scraped_data:
				print("Writing data to output file")
				with open('%s-%s-movie-results.csv' % (location, showdate), 'wb')as csvfile:
					fieldnames = ['Theatre_Name', 'Theatre_Address', 'Movie_Name',
								  'Show_Date', 'Location_or_Zipcode', 'Duration', 'Genre', 'Movie_Rating', 'Star_Rating']
					writer = csv.DictWriter(csvfile, fieldnames=fieldnames, quoting=csv.QUOTE_ALL)
					writer.writeheader()
					for data in scraped_data:
						writer.writerow(data)
			else:
				print("Your search for %s, in %s does not match any movies" % (location, showdate))
		else:
			print("Entered date is already passed")

This looks to be very useful, but I'm running into an error. Here is the full Trackback:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "fandango.py", line 148, in
scraped_data = parse(location, showdate)
File "fandango.py", line 42, in parse
location_response = requests.get(location_url, cookies=cookie, headers=location_headers).json()
File "/Users/Doug/.pyenv/versions/cinenv/lib/python3.6/site-packages/requests/models.py", line 897, in json
return complexjson.loads(self.text, **kwargs)
File "/Users/Doug/.pyenv/versions/3.6.0/lib/python3.6/json/init.py", line 354, in loads
return _default_decoder.decode(s)
File "/Users/Doug/.pyenv/versions/3.6.0/lib/python3.6/json/decoder.py", line 339, in decode
obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
File "/Users/Doug/.pyenv/versions/3.6.0/lib/python3.6/json/decoder.py", line 357, in raw_decode
raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, err.value) from None
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

Any idea what I'm running into? Thanks!

I have exactly the same error. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Traceback:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./fandago.py", line 149, in
scraped_data = parse(location, showdate)
File "./fandago.py", line 43, in parse
location_response = requests.get(location_url, cookies=cookie, headers=location_headers).json()
File "/Users/user/.virtualenvs/movies/lib/python3.7/site-packages/requests/models.py", line 897, in json
return complexjson.loads(self.text, **kwargs)
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/python3.7/json/init.py", line 348, in loads
return _default_decoder.decode(s)
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/python3.7/json/decoder.py", line 337, in decode
obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/python3.7/json/decoder.py", line 355, in raw_decode
raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, err.value) from None
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)