NAME¶
XMLTV::Grab_XML - Perl extension to fetch raw XMLTV data from a site
SYNOPSIS¶
package Grab_XML_rur;
use base 'XMLTV::Grab_XML';
sub urls_by_date( $ ) { my $pkg = shift; ... }
sub country( $ ) { my $pkg = shift; return 'Ruritania' }
# Maybe override a couple of other methods as described below...
Grab_XML_rur->go();
DESCRIPTION¶
This module helps to write grabbers which fetch pages in XMLTV format from some
website and output the data. It is not used for grabbers which scrape
human-readable sites.
It consists of several class methods (package methods). The way to use it is to
subclass it and override some of these.
METHODS¶
- XMLTV::Grab_XML->date_init()
- Called at the start of the program to set up Date::Manip. You might want
to override this with a method that sets the timezone.
- XMLTV::Grab_XML->urls_by_date()
- Returns a hash mapping YYYYMMDD dates to a URL where listings for that
date can be downloaded. This method is abstract, you must override it.
Arguments: the command line options for --config-file and --quiet.
- XMLTV::Grab_XML->xml_from_data(data)
- Given page data for a particular day, turn it into XML. The default
implementation just returns the data unchanged, but you might override it
if you need to decompress the data or patch it up.
- XMLTV::Grab_XML->configure()
- Configure the grabber if needed. Arguments are --config-file option (or
undef) and --quiet flag (or undef).
This method is not provided in the base class; if you don't provide it then
attempts to --configure will give a message that configuration is not
necessary.
- XMLTV::Grab_XML->nextday(day)
- Bump a YYYYMMDD date by one. You probably shouldn't override this.
- XMLTV::Grab_XML->country()
- Return the name of the country you're grabbing for, used in usage
messages. Abstract.
- XMLTV::Grab_XML->usage_msg()
- Return a command-line usage message. This calls "country()", so
you probably need to override only that method.
- XMLTV::Grab_XML->get()
- Given a URL, fetch the content at that URL. The default implementation
calls XMLTV::Get_nice::get_nice() but you might want to override it
if you need to do wacky things with http requests, like cookies.
Note that while this method fetches a page, "xml_from_data()" does
any further processing of the result to turn it into XML.
- XMLTV::Grab_XML->go()
- The main program. Parse command line options, fetch and write data.
Most of the options are fairly self-explanatory but this routine also calls
the XMLTV::Memoize module to look for a --cache argument. The
functions memoized are those given by the "cachables()"
method.
- XMLTV::Grab_XML->cachables()
- Returns a list of names of functions which could reasonably be memoized
between runs. This will normally be whatever function fetches the web
pages - you memoize that to save on repeated downloads. A subclass might
want to add things to this list if it has its own way of fetching web
pages.
- XMLTV::Grab_XML->remove_early_stop_times()
- Checks each stop time and removes it if it's before the start time.
Argument: the XML to correct Returns: the corrected XML
AUTHOR¶
Ed Avis, ed@membled.com
SEE ALSO¶
perl(1),
XMLTV(3).