Shell script to get PIDs from schedules

[Jeremy Nicoll - ml get_iplayer]

"Terry L. Ridder" <artisticforge at gmail.com> wrote:

>Hello
>
>I may have missed something , but where is there any mention of the
www.bbc.co.uk website programme schedules going away?

You've missed this: if a computer program grabs website pages and 'scrapes'
them, which is to say wades through all the rubbish that's there to make the
page look pretty, trying to extract only the data that says what the
tv/radio programmes are, their pids etc... it's

  - complicated
  - slow
  - unreliable because as soon as the BBC alter how the webpages
    work, the scraping programs might need altered

So instead, programmers are concentrating on finding resources that contain
data without frills.  The stuff at:

 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/programmes/schedules/fm/this_week.json

and

 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/programmes/schedules/fm/this_week.yaml

and

 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/programmes/schedules/fm/this_week.xml


(those three URLs are the same except for the last .xxx part) all yield data
that's much more immediately useful to programmers.  The first two are nasty
for a human to look at, the third is easier on the eye.  But as someone said
these simpler-to-use files are going to cease to exist; they're 'deprecated'
which is the term programmers use to mean "something that works now but soon
won't". 

-- 
Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.