Bugzilla – Bug 5949
Information Browser shows news title in description
Last modified: 2009-09-08 09:14:19 UTC
When I view the BBC News stories through the Information Browser, each item in the menu is the title of the news story, but the full news story seems to have the title included in the details too. eg. The BBC news xml feed contains: <item> <title>Man charged over scrapyard deaths</title> <description>A man is charged over the death of an elderly couple whose bodies ... When viewed in the information browser, it appears as: Title: Man charged over scrapyard deaths Description: Man charged over scrapyard deaths Detectives have charged a man with the murder of a couple whose bodies ... There's no need to repeat the title in the body.
Dean asks if you can have a look at this, Triode.
Philip, Can you confirm which interface this is through - web, player display or jive? Also is it for the default rss feeds? From the web interface I don't see duplicated titles for the default rss feeds. You refer to "BBC News" not "BBC News World", so could this problem be with the addon parser hosted on the wiki - are you using this? [way to be sure is look at the infobrowser.opml file and let me know what url and possibly parser is defined for the menu entry you see the problem on]
I see the duplication in PlayerUI and WebUI. Seems to be all feeds. I browsed to Home > Extras > Information Browser > BBC News > World > Bhutto house arrest order lifted Title: Bhutto house arrest order lifted Description: Bhutto house arrest order lifted Roadblocks were set up around Ms Bhutto's Islamabad homePakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto has been released from house arrest in the capital, Islamabad, officials say. Also, sometimes when I've read articles, it appears that some text is corrupted - meaningless sentences, like a line has gone missing or repeated. Long articles are also truncated, ending half way through a sentence. <outline URL="http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/world/rss.xml" parser="Plugins::InfoBrowserAddons::BBC::ParseRSS" text="World" />
Ok so it looks like this is the BBC parser installed from the wiki. [which is a demo of what is possible as an addon and not a core part of SC] What this does is create a menu from the bbc rss feeds, but then parses the low bandwidth version of the linked web page to get the actual story as there is no xml feed for the bbc content. So it is never going to be perfect because the web page layout can vary. If you see repeated title for pure rss feeds (i.e. not related to an infobrowser addon parser) then we should treat this as a priority. If the only case is for the BBC addon parser, then I will try to look at this, but it shouldn't be a bug which needs fixing for SC7.0. Can you confirm if you can recreate for any other feeds? In the mean time I will try to look at the BBC parser - there do look to be cases where the web page includes the same title again and perhaps I can suppress these.
Oh, I understand what you mean now - no, pure RSS feeds seem to be okay - just the BBC parser seems to be the problem.
Phil - could you try the updated BBC.zip file on the wiki. This should unziped into your Plugins/InfoBrowserAddons folder and should replace the existing 3 files there. [only one has actually changed] This should suppress repeated titles from the body of the page.
Yes, title is no longer repeated in the body - thanks. Long articles are still being truncated though. I'm also trying to find an instance where the body doesn't read correctly, and compare with the feed content. Some sentences occasionally just don't look right - missing or duplicated text.
Philip - thanks for the comments. I've changed the target to future as this is not part of base SC functionality and so shouldn't hold up the 7.0 release. I will continue to look at it but I'm afraid its not my top priority at present...
Triode - is it time to take another look at this?
BTW: I think this is fixed. I don't see neither duplicate titles nor truncated articles.
Michael - I don't think there are any core SC bugs remaining. The only remaining issues are related to the BBC web page parsers which are addons which I've hosted on the wiki. These no longer duplicate the title, but could possibly be better formatted - I've not had time to look at this yet.
Closing this as the addon parsers don't need a bug ref here.
This bug appears to have been fixed in the latest release! If you are still experiencing this problem, feel free to reopen the bug with your new comments and we'll have another look. Make sure to include the version number of the software you are seeing the error with.