TheTVDB.com

Hi,

I think its good to have an automatic db-script that corrects accidently wrong entered values. Accrording to http://www.thetvdb.com/wiki/index.php/Category:Episodes, multiple entries in Guest Stars, Director & Writer Fields must be delimited with a pipe symbol ("|"). In my scraped database there are about 15% fields (mainly writer) that are splitted by commata and not by pipe.

any suggestions?

gerosil

Honestly people aren't going to enter these right no matter how much we hound them, and setting loose an automatic fix script is just bound to be a disaster at some point. Wouldn't it make more sense for the scraper to simply accept both commas and pipes?

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Handled completely on the new site, since people are correctly split into a separate table. This will allow the API to properly return each person as a separate XML entity, meaning the end-user app can display it in whatever manner they see fit.

sure, it woulf be better to "educate" the users, but a small SQL should fix all errors at once. something like this should work:



on the other hand, if you redesign the db-scheme in the next release, we could wait a little bit. But I doubt all the scrapers adopt to the new api (for example my favorite media manager Ember Media Manager isn't developed any more)

The new database schema can be used to generate the same results as the current API, but with the errors fixed. Put succinctly, it'll be backwards compatible but more accurate. The problem with your solution is that we can't properly assume that all directors, writers, and actors don't have the word "and" or a comma in the middle of their name or that they shouldn't remain grouped as a single entity.

These instances would be rare, but take the case of "Hootie and the Blowfish". In my opinion a musical group that is listed in the credits on a show as a single group should remain grouped together. They could also be listed individually as "Darius Rucker|Dean Felber|Jim Sonefeld|Mark Bryan". But if we apply your SQL we'd end up with "Hootie|the Blowfish" which is definitely less appropriate than the other two.

Obviously I'm applying this to the instance where someone uses "and" instead of a comma or pipe, but it's merely a demonstration of the issue, which is also true for commas.

Specific comma example... "Peter, Paul and Mary" would result in "Peter|Paul and Mary" or "Peter|Paul|Mary". None of those is as accurate as "Peter, Paul and Mary" existing as a single entity.

Ahh good I was hoping it would be something like this.

It will also f*ck up the name if the actor is called something like Joey McCorney, Jr.

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Sorry for the bump, but in a similar vein to this, would it be possible to suppress characters that cause XML errors?

Quite regularly my program falls over while searching because of people putting strange tags in show descriptions like this which I just caught:



on a show which caused any XML using part of the show name to be unusable by the API.