[mythtv-users] Database problems with umlaut characters

[Michael T. Dean]

  On 10/12/2010 12:10 PM, barbex wrote:
> Hello everybody!
>
> I posted before with this problem but I think I explained it wrong so
> I want to tackle it again.
>
> I'm running myth 0.23-fixes and my system seems to be unable to work
> with the special characters that the german language has to offer.
>
> This problem is evident in the recording screen were the names and
> descriptions are messed up and truncated around such characters and
> right now the frontend doesn't show upcoming recordings (again). The
> schedule still works, I can actually check it with mythweb but the
> frontend throws an error of "Length mismatch" and doesn't show the
> schedule.
>
> In another post someone posted a way to find the problematic bits in
> the database and clean them up manually but not only was that
> procedure much to complicated for my little knowledge I also feel that
> that is not something I want to do every week again after I read in a
> new schedule.
>
> So here is the thing. I download my TV data with a grabber into an XML
> file and then let mythfilldatabase load that data manually.
> I feel like this is the point were the problem should be solved, is
> there a way to tell mythfilldatabase to convert things into UTF8? If
> the schedule gets filled with "clean" data, I'm pretty sure my
> problems will go away.

Sounds like your xmltv file isn't properly setting the encoding, so 
mythfilldatabase is inserting garbage into the database (and/or failing 
to decode the data, so truncating some strings).

> Am I looking at this the right way?

Yes, because MythTV has no problems with non-ASCII (and even non-Latin) 
characters.

Mike