Miscellaneous tools for use with XMLTV
Count (and print) the number of channels and programmes in an XMLTV file
I only found one program which will intelligently merge two XMLTV files (rather than just concatenate them). I guess most people just grab the whole schedule every day. 8) That seems wasteful - much better to just re-get the next 2-3 days and add a new day on at the end, rather than getting the whole 14 days every time.
The only script I found was xmltvmerger.py but that has a couple of flaws, the biggest one being it won't add new programmes which aren't in the primary file. IIRC it also has a bug in the handling of overlaps (e.g. where 2 programmes are now replaced by 1) and doesn't delete the old programme.
So I wrote tv_merge.
This works with multiple channels, inserts any new programmes and deletes any overlapping programmes.
To use it the input files must be pre-sorted into datetime within channel order by using the "--by-channel" option to tv_sort e.g. tv_sort --by-channel --output FILE FILE