TV_CAT(1p)

💖 NAME 💖

tv_cat — concatenate XMLTV listings files, bestie. That's the whole vibe. ✨

---

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

tv_cat [--help] [--utf8] [--output FILE] [FILE...]

---

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so picture this: you hand tv_cat one or more XMLTV files, and it writes a file out to standard output. The programmes in that output? They're the concatenation of the programmes from all your input files. The channels? Those are the union of the channels from all your input files. no cap, that's it. 🫶

• --output FILE — write to FILE rather than standard output. yes ma'am, redirect but make it a flag. 💅

Here's the tea though — programmes and channels get treated slightly differently, and it's lowkey for a reason:

• Programmes — the ordering matters. typically programmes are processed or displayed in the same order as they appear in the input, so we respect that. 🎀
• Channels — these are just a set, indexed by channel id. So no ordering drama. If channel details clash for the same id, you get a warning. ⚠️

One more wrinkle (there's always one 😭): the credits — source, generator and so on — get taken from one of the files, and then there's a warning if the other files differ. Iconic behaviour honestly.

Now for the part where things get real. If two input files have different character encodings, then it is not meaningful to combine their data (not without recoding or other processing, anyway) and tv_cat will literally die with an error message. 💀

But wait — don't panic, because if you do want to combine multiple input files with different character encodings, you can use the --utf8 command-line parameter and it'll create a combined output file in UTF-8 format. slay. ✨

Note: it is not safe to combine mixed encodings to anything other than UTF-8, so no other output encoding is provided for. periodt. 💅

Note 2: any input file which does not have an encoding specified in the xml tag is not only naughty 🙈 but is assumed to already be UTF-8, which may not be true! 😭

And finally, the most honest sentence in any manpage ever:

This tool is rather useless, but it makes a good testbed for the XMLTV module. 🧚 (she's self-aware, we love her for it.)

Oh and — --help is chillin' in the synopsis up there, but this page doesn't spill any more tea about it. 👑

---

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

• xmltv(5) — go read it, iykyk 🌈

---

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Ed Avis, ed@membled.com — the legend herself. 💜

---

perl v5.40.1 · 2025-04-19 — and that's the whole page, bestie, ty for coming to my ted talk, go concatenate something. 🍓🎀✨