NAME

       tv_cat - Concatenate XMLTV listings files.

SYNOPSIS

       tv_cat [--help] [--utf8] [--output FILE] [FILE...]

DESCRIPTION

       Read one or more XMLTV files and write a file to standard output whose programmes are the
       concatenation of the programmes in the input files, and whose channels are the union of
       the channels in the input files.

       --output FILE write to FILE rather than standard output

       The treatment of programmes and channels is slightly different because for programmes, the
       ordering is important (typically programmes are processed or displayed in the same order
       as they appear in the input) whereas channels are just a set indexed by channel id.  There
       is a warning if channel details clash for the same id.

       One more wrinkle is the credits (source, generator and so on), they are taken from one of
       the files and then there's a warning if the other files differ.  If two input files have
       different character encodings, then it is not meaningful to combine their data (without
       recoding or other processing) and tv_cat die with an error message.

       But if you do want to combine multiple input files with different character encodings then
       you can use the --utf8 command-line parameter which will create a combined output file in
       UTF-8 format. (Note: it is not safe to combine mixed encodings to anything other than
       UTF-8 so no other output encoding is provided for.) (Note 2: any input file which does not
       have an encoding specified in the xml tag is not only naughty but is assumed to already be
       UTF-8, which may not be true!)

       This tool is rather useless, but it makes a good testbed for the XMLTV module.

SEE ALSO

       xmltv(5).

AUTHOR

       Ed Avis, ed@membled.com