[mythtv-users] MythFlix problem with odd characters in the movie title.

[Neil Hendin]

Hello all, this is my first post to this list, I have been using
MythTV 0.20(recently upgraded  to
0.21_p13344) on my gentoo linux system for a few months, and wanted to
troubleshoot why MythFlix was not working.  I've been working on it for a
day or so have a working theory I  wanted to share with the community to see
if anyone else sees this problem, or if I should file a bug in the Trac
database.

The symptoms were that the the NetFlix Top100 and Rental History lists would
work, but the Queue browsing would not, giving a "Failed to Retrieve News"
error.  The debug logs would contain "failed to set content from xmlfile".


Looking in the ~/.mythtv/MythFlix directory, I did see a correctly
downloaded Queue file in xml format, so I am confident that the initial
cookie setup is correct and the correct entries about the NetFlix Queues are
added to the mysql database as specified in the instructions for MythFlix
setup.

Our family has a ton of movies (300+) in the netflix queue, some are just
there as bookmarks, so I thought at first it was a length issue, but upon
further troubleshooting, I noticed that we had a particular movie title that
was causing the xml file not to be parsed due to a single character in the
title.  The movie is "Mambo Cafe" but the last letter has an accent over it
in the <title> field of the xml.  In the <description> section, this letter
is represented by the HTML & # 233 ;  (spaces added so that hopefully you
can read it without the HTML getting substituted in your email client).   I
assume that in the <title> field this character is in  UTF-8  encoding.

If I had edit this one character to replace it with a standard, non accented
"e" the queue file is parsed perfectly and all the movies show up in
MythFlix.

The method I used was to copy the downloaded XML file to a temp one, edit
it, save it to the Queue file and chmod a-w it, so at the next invocation,
MythFlix would not be able to overwrite it and would read instead my edited
version.  I have a couple of short test cases, I can email if needed (2
copies of a very short queue, one with the offending character included and
one without).

I thought this might be similar to an issue I found in the Trac changeset:

http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/changeset/10063

This changeset applies to the _description_ field of the movie, not the
title field, but it seems to be  a similar problelm.

Thanks for any suggestions you may have & MythTV is great.  The only
problems I have are this mythflix one and that mythweather needs an update
due to the msnbc format chage (that's already in svn apparently).

--Neil.
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