tv_grab_be - Grab TV listings for Belgium

tv_grab_be --help

tv_grab_be [--config-file FILE] --configure [--slow] [--gui OPTION]

tv_grab_be [--config-file FILE] [--output FILE] [--days N] [--offset N] [--quiet] [--slow] [--gui OPTION]

Output TV and radio listings in XMLTV format for many stations available in Belgium. The data comes from the Sanoma magazines' websites: Tele Moustique and Teve Blad.

First you must run tv_grab_be --configure to choose the language, grab mode and which stations you want to receive.

Then running tv_grab_be with no arguments will get about 6 day's of summary only listings for the channels you chose.

If you want to grab detailed information (such as episode name, detailed descriptions, actors) then use the --slow flag when both onfiguring and running the grabber. The configure mode will prompt you for selection criteria for when the grabber should retrieve detailed information for programmes (selected by start time, category, and channel). This makes grabbing slow (hence the option name!)

Note that different stations ar available in French and Dutch modes due to the listings differences from the two sites. The data is also different the French site has more detailed info for the french language channels, and the Dutch site has more info for the Dutch language channels.

Some channels (BBC World, Euronews) although listed, have such bad listings data that you would be better off using the tv_grab_uk_rt grabber, and then merging the resulting files with tv_cat!

It is perhaps worthwhile to use the --config-file option to maintain one config file with a selection of channels for each language, then using tv_cat to merge the resulting XML files.

--configure Prompt for language, grab mode and which stations to download and write the configuration file (see also --slow)

--config-file FILE Set the name of the configuration file, the default is ~/.xmltv/tv_grab_be.conf. This is the file written by --configure and read when grabbing.

--output FILE When grabbing, write output to FILE rather than standard output.

--days N When grabbing, grab N days rather than as many as possible.

--offset N Start grabbing at today + N. N may be negative.

--quiet suppress the progress messages normally written to standard error.

--slow Slow mode: get detailed information for specified programmes. With --configure, this enables the configuration routine to prompt for the criteria which programs have to match for detailed information downloading. Otherwise, this enables the grabbing of detailed for programmes matching the defined criteria.

--trace show debug information (if Log::TraceMessages is installed)

--gui OPTION Use this option to enable a graphical interface to be used. OPTION may be 'Tk', or left blank for the best available choice. Additional allowed values of OPTION are 'Term' for normal terminal output (default) and 'TermNoProgressBar' to disable the use of Term::ProgressBar.

In --slow mode, unning this grabber requires very many web page fetches (one per channel per day, and then one per programme selected for detailed information) from a very slow web site.

The number of web page fetches can be limited by limiting the number of programs to get detailed information for (by start time range, category or channel). This is defined when run with --configure --slow or in the config file.

xmltv(5), <http://www.telepocket.be>, <http://www.teveblad.be>

Niel Markwick, nielm@bigfoot.com Based on tv_grab_uk_rt

The website parsing isn't perfect and there may be warning messages about bits of HTML that aren't understood. Some of the details provided by the site have to be thrown away because they cannot be accommodated in the XMLTV format; again, warning messages are printed.

Programmes containing defined sections are not handled very well (such as Sportpaleis on Canvas) because the data source lists the sections separately with overlapping timeslots. eg:

The data on the website can also be poor. Program names gain and lose random punctuation from week to week. eg:

The grabber strips trailing punctuation to help avoid this.

Sometimes the stop time is not put on last programme of the day. This can be worked around by piping the output through tv_sort, and the start time of the first program of the next day will be used. Alternatively, the following complex tv_grep command can add an implicit stop time of 06:00:

tv_grep -e 'if (not ${$_}{stop}) { (${$_}{stop} = ${$_}{start}) =~ s/\d{6}\b/060000/ }; 1'

Finally there are several things still to do (see TODO list in source code for full description).

2004-01-08 nielm - first version with selective detail grabbing, based on tv_grab_uk_rt 0.5.27

2004-01-09 nielm - Disable detail grabbing by default; implemented --slow option to enable detail grabbing and to complicate configuration procedure; . Removed implicit generation of stop time. Correct windows special characters (128-159): oe ligatures -> oe; fancy quotes -> normal quotes, others -> ? (with warning); Fixed warning about Log::Tracemessages::On.

2004-01-13 nielm - Replace '...' Windows character; Added parsing of star ratings; warn about unrecognised images in description text; Added parsing of movie ratings (classifications); Future-proof config file to cope with grabbing multiple languages simultaneously; Added --output option

2004-01-15 nielm - Put year into date tag; Put director of films (if found in descr) into director tag; Get year from descr if not found, add channel logos (from satlogo.com).

2004-01-26 nielm - handle VO/OV image without warning; make multi-line descriptions; correct date parsing; correct episode num in FR listings; correct stop time bug when no stop time defined; removed lang=xx from title and sub-title;

2004-01-29 nielm - add icons in rating and star-rating; handle episode numbers in titles better; handle extracting of director better.

2004-02-23 nielm/epaepa - tidy up of help text, remove newlines from desc, improve start/stop time details matching, add detaul URL to fast mode programme info

2004-03-04 nielm - Correct usage, handle Duree (length), handle repeats (previously-shown), handle episode numbers in description. More things added to TODO list (see source code)

2004-03-09 nielm - Remove Duree and (R.) from description text. Remove categories in description. Do not put episode numbers in sub-title

2004-04-01 nielm - Fixed bug with no stop time for programs starting at midnight, handle 'New' icon, Fixed JIMTV channel ID, handle 'Divers' tags (which may contain info on previously-shown), remove 'gastacteurs:' from actor names.

2004-04-05 epaepa/nielm - Make time zones consistantly +0100 or +0200, but never mixed. Clean up punctuation around actor names. Remove duplicate ChannelID from file (only put alternative ID's). better actor parsing

2004-04-05 epaepa/nielm - Handle user input better during config (CTRL-D, CTRL-H), use substrings not regexps for category/channel matching to avoid nastyness when a user enters a bad regexp. Add magic category *NONE* and *ALL* for category matching.

2004-04-15 nielm - yet more cleanup in parsing actor names, ignore programmes with no titles.

2005-03-12 nielm - no function changes: just changes to the configuration section to use XMLTV::ask, and updates to the channel_ids files

2005-09-22 nielm - www.telemoustique.be no longer works: quick and dirty fix: use www.telepocket.be instead.