TV_EXTRACTINFO_EN(1p)

💖 TV_EXTRACTINFO_EN 💖

okay so bestie, this is the tv_extractinfo_en page from the User Contributed Perl Documentation section, and it's giving very niche, very iconic little utility energy. sit down, hydrate, let's get into it 🍓

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✨ NAME ✨

tv_extractinfo_en — read English-language listings and extract info from programme descriptions.

like, it reads the words a human wrote and turns them into stuff a machine can actually use. the way that it serves 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

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

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So it reads XMLTV data and tries to pull information out of English-language programme descriptions, turning all that into machine-readable form. For example, the human-readable text (repeat) sitting in a programme description might get replaced by the XML element <previously-shown>. no cap, it's literally translating vibes into structured data ✨

• --output FILE — write to FILE rather than standard output. that's it, that's the whole flag, and she's doing her best 🫶

This tool also attempts to split multipart programmes into their constituents, by looking for a description that seems to contain lots of times and titles. But — and this is important, bestie — it depends on the description following one particular style, and it's useful only for some listings sources (Ananova). so it's very much an "iykyk" situation 😭

If some text is marked with the 'lang' attribute as being some language other than English ('en'), it is ignored. she simply does not see it. not her problem 💀

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

xmltv(5).

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Ed Avis, ed@membled.com

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💀 BUGS 💀

Trying to parse human-readable text is always error-prone — and even more so with the simple regexp-based approach used here. like, regex against human language? the audacity, honestly 🙈

But because TV listing descriptions usually conform to one of a few set styles, tv_extractinfo_en does reasonably well. It is fairly conservative, trying 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's choosing peace, and honestly? valid.

However, the leftover bits of text after extracting information may not form a meaningful English sentence, or the punctuation may be wrong. so yeah, it can leave you with a sentence that's a little... unhinged. it's not her fault, the source text was like that 🌸

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 if you point it at some random other listing source, no promises, bestie 🎀

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and that's the whole page!! mwah 💖 this was TV_EXTRACTINFO_EN(1p), brought to you by perl v5.40.1, dated 2025-04-19 — she's a little older than your fave but she still ate, fr fr ✨👑