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Encyclopedia API

ANN now provides a direct feed to the Encyclopedia data in XML format. There are two parts to the API.

1. Reports

On the reports page you'll find a list of various dynamically-generated reports. Click on any of these and you'll see a "display as xml" link to get the results in XML format.

The number of rows in any report (either HTML or XML format) can be controlled with the url parameters nskip and nlist. For example you can get the first 50 rows with nskip=0&nlist=50, the next 50 rows with nskip=50&nlist=50, or all rows at once with nlist=all. Some reports accept additional parameters, like this one where type=anime limits the results to anime titles only, and name=Z limits the results to titles starting with the letter Z. See individual reports for details.

If you are building an application which requires a database of anime titles, a typical usage scenario would be to make an initial import with reports.xml?id=155&type=anime&nlist=all and then do a daily import of newly added titles with reports.xml?id=155&type=anime&nlist=50

2. Anime/Manga Details

If you need more information than the basic details provided in the reports, use this API to fetch detailled information for each title. The basic syntax is https://cdn.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/api.xml?anime=id. Instead of anime you should use manga if you are fetching a manga's details, or title if it could be either. For example:

Details for a single title can contain a lot of data so please try to spare our poor servers by fetching (and then caching) details from this API only as needed. In a typical usage scenario, you could present to your users a list of all anime titles imported using the reports above. When a user needs additional info about a certain title your backend would fetch the details for that single title and cache them for a week (older titles especially tend not to change so much).

2a. Batching

You can request details for several titles at once by specifying the anime/manga/title parameter more than once, or by using a slash-separated list of ids instead of a single id. You can also get results by name by specifying ~name instead of an id. Please note this does not match alternative titles, only the primary name (the one in the page title). For example these are all equivalent ways to get details for the 3 titles in the Jinki franchise at once: Please note that you can only batch up to 50 titles at once.

Terms of Service

We provide this API free of charge but you must
  1. list Anime News Network as the source of the data
  2. include a link to the relevant Encyclopedia entry (like "full details at Anime News Network") on any page that displays anime/manga/person details

Usage Limits

The API is rate-limited to 1 request per second per IP address; requests over this threshold will be delayed. If you would rather make 5 requests close together every 5 seconds, use nodelay.api.xml instead; but requests over the 1/s threshold will get a 503 error.