[mythtv-users] Odd Characters in some channels guide (EIT)

[Michael T. Dean]

On 07/15/2008 02:52 PM, Joan Vallés wrote:
> About a month ago some odd characters started appearing in some
> channels guide. In mythfrontend they look as squares before the title
> or description. In mythweb they look as a square with the numbers
> "0005" inside. [I'm attaching an image in case I didn't explain well]
>
> Anyone knows what's happening? I'm thinking in running a script every
> minute to clean the database, but I don't like it.

If it's (always) really Unicode character 0005, ENQ (enquiry), it's a C0
Control (non-printable) character.

What it's meant to do and why your EIT provider is including it, I
couldn't tell you (but I'd guess it's some kind of mistake on their part).

Whether it and other non-printable characters should be stripped from
the EIT data, I'll leave up to the EIT experts.

We don't strip any of these characters from caption/subtitle data,
either, so you can occasionally see them.  For me, the only one I
generally see in captions is 000A, LF (linefeed), which appears as a
square--the same as your character does in the frontend--as that's how
freetype represents a character that's not part of the currently-used font.

Mike