malformed JSON string

[jmwislez]

when running the grabber I get:

malformed JSON string, neither array, object, number, string or atom, at character offset 0 (before "(end of string)") at ./tv_grab_uk_sky_2 line 205.

Any clue?

[jmwislez]

Solved after I found on a forum that one needs to search and replace www.sky.com/portletepg
with
epgservices.sky.com/tvlistings-proxy

But now I bump into the next problem:
malformed UTF-8 character in JSON string, at character offset 17142 (before "\x{9b6f}i movies","c...") at /usr/local/bin/tv_grab_uk_sky line 205.

[Floppy]

Hm, interesting - looks like they've changed the URL, and might be using UTF-16 encoding. Does changing JSON.parse(...) to JSON.parse(..., "UTF-16") make any difference?

[Floppy]

Sorry, that's completely the wrong language, I'm used to thinking in Ruby :)

Just looking for how to do it in Perl...

[Floppy]

Looks like it should be something like this instead of decode_json():

use Encode;
$object = JSON::XS->new->decode (decode "UTF-16BE", $jsontext);

Found at http://search.cpan.org/~makamaka/JSON-2.21/lib/JSON.pm in section 'utf8'

[jmwislez]

It's actually UTF-8, but it works! Thanks a lot!

[jmwislez]

Maybe I shouldn't have closed this issue as long as the downloadable code is not on. If you want I can provide it by mail.

[Floppy]

Great! Yes, if you have a patch, please put it in here and I will apply it to the code. Thanks!

[jmwislez]

--- /home/jmw/tv_grab_uk_sky.orig 2010-07-16 19:37:29.000000000 +0200
+++ /usr/local/bin/tv_grab_uk_sky 2010-07-15 12:46:36.000000000 +0200
@@ -73,6 +73,7 @@
use JSON;
use HTML::Entities;
use DateTime;
+use Encode;

my( $opt, $conf ) = ParseOptions( {
grabber_name => "tv_grab_uk_sky",
@@ -104,12 +105,12 @@
my $timestr = $time->strftime("%Y%m%d%H%M"); # Time and date in YYYYMMDDhhmm format
my $dur = $last_day - $grab_offset < 2 ? 1440 : 2880; # Length of data to fetch in minutes (2880 max - 2 days)
my $detail = 2; # 2 gives full epg data with descriptions, any other number gives no desc.

• my $url = "http://www.sky.com/portletepg/TVListingsProxy/tvlistings.json?channels=$channel&dur=$dur&detail=$detail&time=$timestr";
  

• my $url = "http://epgservices.sky.com/tvlistings-proxy/TVListingsProxy/tvlistings.json?channels=$channel&dur=$dur&detail=$detail&time=$timestr";
  

  my $res = get($url);
  $res =~ s/""$//g;
  if (length($res) > 0)
  {

•   my $channel_data = decode_json $res;
  

•   my $channel_data = JSON::XS->new->decode (decode "UTF-8", $res);
  # Store channel information
  

  foreach my $x ($channel_data->{channels})
  {
  @@ -200,9 +201,9 @@
  my( $conf, $opt ) = @_;
  my $channel_list = '';

• # Load http://www.sky.com/portletepg/TVListingsProxy/init.json and convert to XML channel list
  

• my $res = get( "http://www.sky.com/portletepg/TVListingsProxy/init.json" );
  

• my $channel_data = decode_json $res;
  

• # Load http://epgservices.sky.com/tvlistings-proxy/TVListingsProxy/init.json and convert to XML channel list
  

• my $res = get( "http://epgservices.sky.com/tvlistings-proxy/TVListingsProxy/init.json" );
  

• my $channel_data = JSON::XS->new->decode (decode "UTF-8", $res);
  

  foreach my $channel (@{$channel_data->{channels}})
  {

[jmwislez]

Hmm, this formats strangely. Hope you can extract the patch. I can't find out how to submit it properly ...

[Floppy]

I've finally got around to applying this patch. Sorry it took so long! I can't test it locally (no XMLTV setup any more), so let me know if you have any problems.