Improve XML of tvshow.nfo and episode.nfo files

Posted on Author Kodi Community Forum - All Forums

I’ve written a couple of programs in different languages that produce and parse tvshow.nfo and TV episode .nfo files. The only things that have tripped me up are that `<actor>` and `<genre>` are repeated tags instead of being wrapped in containing tags.

Lots of languages have great tools to automatically serialise/deserialise XML to dicts/hashmaps, but they expect array elements to be wrapped in containing elements. To make it easier to integrate with them, it’d be great if these formats could also support an `<actors>` tag to contain multiple `<actor>` entries, and the same for genre. So instead of:

Code:
<tvshow>
  ...
    <actor>
        <name>Hugh Laurie</name>
        <role>Dr. Gregory House</role>
        <thumb>http://thetvdb.com/banners/actors/23839.jpg</thumb>
    </actor>
    <actor>
        <name>Robert Sean Leonard</name>
        <role>Dr. James Wilson</role>
        <thumb>http://thetvdb.com/banners/actors/23842.jpg</thumb>
    </actor>
    ...
    <genre>Comedy</genre>
    <genre>Drama</genre>
</tvshow>

Kodi would support:

Code:
<tvshow>
  ...
    <actors>
      <actor>
        <name>Hugh Laurie</name>
        <role>Dr. Gregory House</role>
        <thumb>http://thetvdb.com/banners/actors/23839.jpg</thumb>
      </actor>
      <actor>
        <name>Robert Sean Leonard</name>
        <role>Dr. James Wilson</role>
        <thumb>http://thetvdb.com/banners/actors/23842.jpg</thumb>
      </actor>
    </actors>
    ...
    <genres>
      <genre>Comedy</genre>
      <genre>Drama</genre>
    </genres>
</tvshow>

If this was added as an extra supported format, there’d be no backward-incompatible changes, but it’d make life easier for people using the automatic serialisation/deserialisation libraries that expect to wrap an array in a containing tag.