ValidateFile(3)

💅 ValidateFile(3) — the Perl manual page, bestie edition ✨

Okay so picture this: it's ValidateFile(3) from the User Contributed Perl Documentation section, and she's here to make sure your XMLTV file is actually valid and not a whole mess. Let's get into it 🫶

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🌸 NAME 🌸

XMLTV::ValidateFile — literally validates an XMLTV file, that's the whole job, no cap.

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🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

It's a utility library, iykyk. What it does is validate that a file is correct according to http://wiki.xmltv.org/index.php/XMLTVFormat. That's the vibe check. If your file doesn't match the format spec, this module will find out 💀

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✨ EXPORTED FUNCTIONS ✨

Bestie listen — all of these functions are exported on demand. You gotta ask for them, they're not just showing up uninvited.

🦋 LoadDtd

Loads the xmltv dtd. Takes a single parameter, which is the name of the xmltv dtd file.

⚠️ Heads up: LoadDtd must be called before ValidateFile can be called. No exceptions, the order matters fr fr.

🌈 ValidateFile

Validates that a file is valid according to the XMLTV dtd and tries to check that it contains valid information. ValidateFile takes a filename as parameter, and optionally also a day and an offset, and prints error messages to STDERR.

ValidateFile returns a list of errors that it found with the file. Each error takes the form of a keyword 👑 And she checks the following:

• notwell — the file is not well-formed XML. 😭
• notvalid — the file does not follow the XMLTV DTD.
• invalidid — an xmltvid does not look like a proper id, i.e. it does not match /^[-a-zA-Z0-9]+(\.[-a-zA-Z0-9]+)+$/.
• duplicateid — more than one channel-entry found for a channelid.
• unknownid — no channel-entry found for a channelid that is used in a programme-entry.
• noprogrammes — no programme entries were found in the file. Empty. Void. Nothing.
• emptytitle — a programme entry with an empty or missing title was found.
• emptydescription — a programme entry with an empty desc-element was found. The desc-element shall be omitted if there is no description, so like… don't do that.
• badstart — a programme entry with an invalid start-time was found.
• badstop — a programme entry with an invalid stop-time was found.
• badepisode — a programme entry with an invalid episode number was found.
• missingtimezone — the start/stop time for a programme entry does not include a timezone.
• invalidtimezone — the start/stop time for a programme entry contains an invalid timezone.
• badiso8859 — the file is encoded in iso-8859 but contains characters that have no meaning in iso-8859 (or are control characters). If it's iso-8859-1 (aka Latin 1) it might be some characters in windows-1252 encoding 💀
• badutf8 — the file is encoded in utf-8 but contains characters that look strange. The list, because she's thorough:
  1. Mis-encoded single characters represented with [EF][BF][BD] bytes
  2. Mis-encoded single characters represented with [C3][AF][C2][BF][C2][BD] bytes
  3. Mis-encoded single characters in range [C2][80-9F]
• badentity — the file contains one or more undefined XML entities.

And if no errors are found? An empty list is returned. Clean file, main character energy, we love to see it 💖

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💀 BUGS 💀

It is currently necessary to specify the path to the xmltv dtd-file. This should not be necessary. That's it, that's the bug. Annoying, but iconic in its own way 🙈

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👑 COPYRIGHT 👑

Copyright (C) 2006 Mattias Holmlund.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

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That's the whole page, periodt 🎀 This build is from perl v5.42.2, dated 2025-06-30 — so like, enjoy your very own ValidateFile(3), go forth and validate, bestie 🌟💜