TV_EXTRACTINFO_EN(1)

💅 TV_EXTRACTINFO_EN(1) 💅

okay so first things first, the manual name for this one is TV_EXTRACTINFO_EN(1) — it lives in the User Contributed Perl Documentation section, and honestly? iconic of it.

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✨ NAME ✨

tv_extractinfo_en — reads English-language TV listings and pulls actual info out of the programme descriptions 🎀

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

tv_extractinfo_en [--help] [--output FILE] [FILE...]

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

So what this bad boy does: it reads XMLTV data and tries to extract information out of English-language programme descriptions, turning all that human-readable prose into machine-readable form. Like, glow-up for data. ✨

For example, the human-readable text '(repeat)' sitting in a programme description might get replaced by the XML element <previously-shown>. She understood the assignment. 💅

• --output FILE — write to FILE instead of standard output

This tool also tries to split multipart programmes into their constituents, by looking for a description that seems to contain lots of times and titles. But ngl, that depends on the description following one particular style, and it's useful only for some listings sources — specifically Ananova. So like… conditional slay. 🫶

If some text is marked with the 'lang' attribute as being some language other than English ('en'), it is ignored. not her business, not her problem. 🙈

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

xmltv(5).

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🧚 AUTHOR 🧚

Ed Avis, ed@membled.com — thank you for your service 🫡💖

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💀 BUGS 💀

okay bestie, real talk. Trying to parse human-readable text is always error-prone — and even more so with the simple regexp-based approach used here. like, we're doing our best with a regexp, okay?? 😭

But because TV listing descriptions usually conform to one of a few set styles, tv_extractinfo_en does reasonably well. It's fairly conservative — it tries to avoid false positives (extracting "information" which isn't really there) even though this means some false negatives (failing to extract information and leaving it in the human-readable text). she would rather miss a thing than invent a thing, and honestly? respect. 🌈

However — and this is the part where we hold hands — the leftover bits of text after extracting information may not form a meaningful English sentence, or the punctuation may be wrong. the vibes may be off. it's giving frankenstein sentence. 🧟‍♀️

On the two listings sources currently supported by the XMLTV package, this program does a reasonably good job. But it has not been tested with every source of anglophone TV listings. so like, no cap, there are unknowns out there. 💀

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🌟 cute sign-off time: this page is from perl v5.42.2, dated 2025-06-30, and yes it's still TV_EXTRACTINFO_EN(1) all the way down. bye bestie, go extract some info 💜🎀💖