EPG/XML parsing: reading Season and Episode data from title

[Sykor]

Maybe one the already available utilities/plugins already does it, but I couldn't find it through my searches. The closest I could find was in old UltraXMLtv's wiki page, about Series/Episode Lookup, but I'm not sure if that's what I'm looking for exactly.

I grab my epg data (for Portugal) through xmltv's tv_grab_pt, and xmltv's source for Portugal, puts the season and episode number in the programmes' title (ex. "Dexter S1 E02").

Is there any utility that can detect and cut that sort of data when available, and paste it to the proper tag, for the Enhancer to read it?

[markbb1]

Maybe one the already available utilities/plugins already does it, but I couldn't find it through my searches. The closest I could find was in old UltraXMLtv's wiki page, about Series/Episode Lookup, but I'm not sure if that's what I'm looking for exactly.

I grab my epg data (for Portugal) through xmltv's tv_grab_pt, and xmltv's source for Portugal, puts the season and episode number in the programmes' title (ex. "Dexter S1 E02").

Is there any utility that can detect and cut that sort of data when available, and paste it to the proper tag, for the Enhancer to read it?

If it has never been done, it probably could. I could probably do it in PERL, but it would be ugly, and you probably don't have PERL for Windows installed. You could try alternate xmltv generators such as mc2xml (if Portugal is supported) or TVXB. TVXB has an ini file that was working as of March this year. Maybe one of those grabbers would tag season and episode data, although there is no guarantee that the data is reliable. For example, the provider for North America uses an episode number something like "EP00353633.0001". Although there is a hash for deciphering it to season and episode number, the algorithm is not included in grabbers.

My recommendation is to try other grabbers and see if the data from them is more useful to you.

[Sykor]

If it has never been done, it probably could. I could probably do it in PERL, but it would be ugly, and you probably don't have PERL for Windows installed. You could try alternate xmltv generators such as mc2xml (if Portugal is supported) or TVXB. TVXB has an ini file that was working as of March this year. Maybe one of those grabbers would tag season and episode data, although there is no guarantee that the data is reliable. For example, the provider for North America uses an episode number something like "EP00353633.0001". Although there is a hash for deciphering it to season and episode number, the algorithm is not included in grabbers.

My recommendation is to try other grabbers and see if the data from them is more useful to you.

It is an somewhat easy task to accomplish, even for a once-a-year programmer (like me), and I'll probably do just that (write a small app to search those sequences and modify the line in the file), but there would be no point in "reinventing the wheel" if a ready-to-use solution was already available

[bholio]

For example, the provider for North America uses an episode number something like "EP00353633.0001". Although there is a hash for deciphering it to season and episode number, the algorithm is not included in grabbers.

Can someone shed some more light on this algorithm? Where would I begin searching for it? I can't think of a term to enter into google to start looking.

Thanks.

[markbb1]

Can someone shed some more light on this algorithm? Where would I begin searching for it? I can't think of a term to enter into google to start looking.

Thanks.

As for the "dd_progid" form of episode data, according to a post at http://forums.digiguide.com/topic.asp?id...agesize=15 ,
"Don't try and parse those fields, Zap2IT says there is no pattern." But there may be a way of resolving the episode number from the data in the "onscreen" ep tags. I can't remember where I got the idea that the "dd_progid" data was resolvable. To get the above URL I did a Google search on "xmltv parse season episode".

[whurlston]

Yeah, the dd_progid is TMS's internal id. The number before the period is the Series ID. The number after the period should be the episode number. The "EP" means it's an episodic show (the show has episodes). So if a show has 10 episodes it's first season and 12 it's second season, Season 2 Episode 3's dd_progid should end with ".0013". The problem is that unless you know how many episodes each season had, there is no way to go from the dd_progid to the Sea # Ep # format. This is where the "onscreen" value comes in. The problem with that is that some shows will number their episodes strangely, like Episode "#X03".

[bholio]

So if a show has 10 episodes it's first season and 12 it's second season, Season 2 Episode 3's dd_progid should end with ".0013". The problem is that unless you know how many episodes each season had, there is no way to go from the dd_progid to the Sea # Ep # format. This is where the "onscreen" value comes in. The problem with that is that some shows will number their episodes strangely, like Episode "#X03".

I just tried manually counting out episodes of '24' and 'family guy' on thetvdb.com and I can't make either of them match the episode number in EPxxxxx.### that shows up in my xmltv. They are close, but not quite right. There are a number of 'special' episodes which might be messing up the count, but I could come up with no algorithm to figure it out.

Its too bad..

[whurlston]

Yeah, things like that never seem work the way they are supposed to. One could include unaired episodes while the other does not. I never really looked into it beyond the theory, sorry.