New radio PIDs, more than 8 characters

[Vangelis forthnet]

 On Sun Aug 13 18:28:42 BST 2017, RS wrote: 

> The Al Gore one is now p05c2b9j
> (snip) 
> The changes may be temporary.

... Yes and no... If you browse to: 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p016tl04/episodes/player

you'll see there exist two distinct entries for 
"Former US Vice President Al Gore on Climate Change": 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w172vg029mkl852
(which looks more like the proper episode page) and 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05c2b9j

 I haven't listened to them fully to compare them, 
both are listed as being 52min59sec in duration...
The next ("Trump... ") episode of the series is still 
only available as a "w" PID. And on 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p029zl67/episodes/player

latest episode is still available as an 8-digit "w" PID :-(

 The crux of the matter is that these "w"-PID progs 
are not recordable with the current iteration of GiP, 
not even when the progs are indexed inside the 
radio.cache and one uses "<index> --get" to fetch! 
Haven't seen the figures for UK audiences, but 
I'll let you know WSR is very popular overseas! 

 On Sun Aug 13 20:54:11 BST 2017, C E Macfarlane wrote: 

> > [bpw][a-z0-9]{14}
> (snip)
> Firstly it would have to be ... {8,14}, 
> otherwise shorter ones would not be picked up.

 Rather "{7,14}", since the minimum character length 
of a PID is 8...

> But there is a potential problem with [a-z0-9] 
> because it would pick out many normal English words, 
> for example, ironically, 'programmes' and 'programming'.

 Again, forgive me for being obtuse, still learning things, 
but isn't that scenario assuming one actually inputs 

--pid="programming" 

into a GiP command? (and in that case, even if the string 
is validated as a PID, the playlist.json URL will not 
return any vpid for that PID, hence no download...).

Best regards, 
Vangelis.