[mythtv-users] Radio Times XMLTV failing

Nick knowledgejunkie at gmail.com
Tue Oct 3 23:50:13 UTC 2006


On 03/10/06, Neil Dunbar <neil.dunbar at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Monday 02 October 2006 23:20, malcolm torrent wrote:
> > I'd like to echo Simon's thanks to Neil for the fix.
> > I tried to diagnose this myself (unsuccessfully) so if possible I'd be
> > interested in a short explanation as to how the problem was
> > approached, resolved and why this fix works.
> > Mal.
>
> OK. The problem is corruption in the datafile 1961.dat, which corresponds to
> the schedules for ITV4 (running mythfilldatabase from the command line shows
> the Unicode wide character \u0000 is not acceptable within an XML document).
> So I wget'ed the offending URL and looked at the file with a binary editor
> (bvi), searched for the sequence of null characters.
>
> First thing I thought was to stop the script dying (comment out the "croak"
> instruction in the XMLTV code), but then it just died with a "unexpected
> end-of-file" error. So I had to replace the offending text with something
> else, so I stuck in that line in tv_grab_uk_rt which substitutes \u0000 with
> the text ".." (ie, something harmless). Now, all of that said, there may very
> well be a legitimate use of a sequence of two nulls in Unicode (eg, for 3 or
> 4 byte wide characters), so this kludge can't stay in - it replaces the nulls
> without regard for their context in the file.
>
> In the end, I suspect it's just a bit of file corruption from Radio Times.
> It's not happening anywhere else in the data feed, and it'll disappear from
> the schedules on Saturday, and we can say goodbye to ugly kludges.
>
> A longer term fix would be for XMLTV to replace offending Unicode characters
> with harmless ones, just to be a bit more robust when dealing with partially
> corrupted data. I may have a look at this over the weekend.

It seems the ITV4 data is no longer problematic - just ran
tv_grab_uk_rt without the substitution with no problems.

Nick

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