Another thing that kept me busy over the last few days was enhancing, tv_grab_nl_upc, my program for fetching television guide data for UPC’s digital cable network in The Netherlands and outputting the results in XMLTV format.
Of all the stuff I’ve written, this is possibly the most obscure and least useful to anyone else (of course, I’ve said that before and been wrong). Nevertheless, necessity is the mother of invention, and I need this program, so I’ve been working on improving it over the Christmas period.
Specifically, this new version uses some heuristics to try to derive a subtitle for the programme in question. Ideally, this should be the episode name for a series, the destination city/country for a travel programme, etc. Sometimes, UPC includes this kind of information as part of the programme’s description, but programmatically determining whether the first sentence of the description is suitable for use as a subtitle is a tricky business; hence the many man hours that have gone into the 0.5.0 release, as I had to perform a fair amount of textual analysis and parser refinement before reaching the point that plucking text from the description to use as the subtitle was logical enough to be more use than hindrance.
Anyway, 0.5.0 of tv_grab_nl_upc is now out, even if I’m the only one who cares.