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I'm interested in doing some analysis of recipes for fun. Ideally, I would like to obtain open recipe database(s) behind {foodily, allrecipes, recipes, bigoven, cooking, cooks}.com or something like that.

I am interested in databases which have many variations of recipes, such as hundreds of slightly different chocolate chip cookie recipes (in statistical talk, I'm interested in doing a principal components analysis on chocolate cookie recipes).

APIs would be okay if there aren't any databases available for download. I saw this related recipe API: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/19453/does-allrecipes-com-site-have-an-api (I'm not interested in pay APIs like yummly or food2fork)

Finally, (please correct me if I'm wrong), recipes aren't copyrightable in the basic format of: ingredients plus preparation directions (Publications International v Meredith Corp). I'm interested in these types of recipes.

Community
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respectPotentialEnergy
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4 Answers4

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hrecipe (and microformats in general) are the bees knees and lucky for you are widely employed across the web; here's a list of sites actively publishing hrecipes in the wild; you can scrape and parse as you please!
http://www.eat-vegan.rocks/
http://funcook.com/
http://www.therecipedepository.com
http://sabores.sapo.pt/
http://www.epicurious.com/
http://www.williams-sonoma.com/
http://foodnetwork.com/
http://www.plantoeat.com/recipe_book
http://www.essen-und-trinken.de
http://itsripe.com/recipes/
this list was lifted from the hrecipes specification on the microformats wiki ->
http://microformats.org/wiki/hrecipe

EDIT:
Auntie's Recipes Repository

albert
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    What about an actual database dump, that you can integrate into an application without additional work of scraping or paying? – Worse_Username Jan 03 '18 at 11:47
  • i'm not aware of one. you could do it and post here ;) – albert Jan 03 '18 at 14:01
  • It would be very helpful if it was clear which of these require payment/subscription – jcollum Jan 27 '19 at 17:20
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    I've looked at the first 4 links and don't see how this actually answers the question -- this is just a list of sites publishing in hrecipe format -- there's no databases or open data that I can see in that list – jcollum Jan 27 '19 at 17:24
  • you missed this part: "you can scrape and parse as you please!" – albert Jan 28 '19 at 01:34
  • There should be an asterisk next to "you can scrape and parse as you please!". The terms and services in these sites may forbid you from doing this. I know for a fact that the foodnetwork's site says the data can only be used in free to access sites and they must link back to foodnetwork. You should also be courteous and limit your crawling to not bomb out thier site. Also look at the robots.txt to determine if they forbid crawlers. – TemporaryFix Nov 21 '20 at 02:02
  • (iii) use an automatic device or manual process to copy or "scrape" the Websites or Website Content for any purpose without the express written permission of Scripps Networks, frame the Websites or Website Content except to the extent we have given you explicit permission to do so, or use any of our trademarks as meta tags. Notwithstanding the foregoing, Scripps Networks grants public search engine operators permission to use automatic devices to copy Website Content from the Websites for the sole purpose of creating a searchable index of Website Content that is available to the public. – TemporaryFix Nov 21 '20 at 02:06
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If you haven't already, check our ProgrammableWeb - it lets you search for APIs by keyword, type, etc.

Hope this helps.

Mark Headd
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I found this recipe scraper python package which you can utilize to download.

  1. Recipe Scraper Python Script: https://github.com/hhursev/recipe-scrapers

If you are lazy enough to do, you can download the following, It's huge.

  1. Pre Scraped Data by MIT EDU: http://pic2recipe.csail.mit.edu/
Rana Jayant
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I found this project on Github that compiles recipes into a JSON formatted dump file: https://github.com/fictivekin/openrecipes

After trying to figure out why the link on the readme didn't download the latest dump properly, I discovered that the dump process is broken but that the last dump that did work was found at this link: https://s3.amazonaws.com/openrecipes/20170107-061401-recipeitems.json.gz

I had been looking for the same thing for a while now too. Hope that helps.

Anker Peet
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