Re: [Xmltv-devel] tv_grab_de: " und uuml;"

[Ed A. <ed...@me...>]

On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Axel Thimm wrote:

>the tv_grab_de sources seem to have a bug in their generator
>(http://www.szing.at/xmltv/). Instead of generating "&whatever;" for
>html entries, it generates " und whatever;".

It's always best to give an example when reporting things like
this.  Anyway, one example is
<http://yasd.cc/xmltv/tv_20030222.xml.gz>, which when gunzipped
contains the line:

  <title lang="de">und Auml;gypten und das obere Niltal</title>

which should surely be &Auml;gypten, the first letter being capital
A-umlaut.

>Note that "und" is the german word for "and", so probably some
>varible called "und" contains the ampersand, but the variable isn't
>referenced correctly.

No, I think I know the explanation.  The upstream listings source is
using the & character and because this cannot be included raw in XML,
it is converted to 'und', which means 'and'.

It should instead be converted to the entity &amp; but perhaps there
were other quoting problems and just getting rid of the & altogether
was the easiest thing to do.  ISTR that I once did this for
tv_grab_uk, doing 's/&/ and /g', because trying to write out a correct
&amp; entity with the XML libraries was too confusing.  I may even
have suggested this kludge to the chap who provides tv_grab_de's
listings.

>Unfortunatley there is no address to contact at
>http://www.szing.at/xmltv/.

It is Gottfried Szing a.k.a. 'Goofy' (who is mentioned in the
tv_grab_de manual page), I have cc'd him on this message.

>Should this be fixed in xmltv (s/ und ([a-zA-Z]*;)/\&$/g)?

Maybe but I think it is better to see if G.S. can fix it at his end.

>BTW is such html code (&xxx;) in the xmltv output well defined?

Ah - good point, I had forgotten that.  No, an entity like
&Aauml; will not be allowed.  Try nsgmls to confirm this:

nsgmls:test.xml:6:12:E: general entity "Aauml" not defined and no
default entity

So that could be the reason to get rid of the & character globally.

My guess is that the upstream data source from which the XML files are
generated is in HTML, or uses HTML entities.  The generator should use
HTML::Entities if it is written in Perl, or the equivalent library in
languages, to decode the entities into Latin-1 characters.

Goofy, do you think you can implement this?

-- 
Ed Avis <ed...@me...>