Wishlist created by TiVo Search not working

[sinanju]

I wanted to create a Season Pass for "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" a while back, but there were no upcoming episodes in the schedule. I used TiVo Search to find the show and took advantage of the option to create an autorecording Wishlist. Now that the show is in the schedule and findable via a title search, the Wishlist isn't recording anything.

TiVo Search created the Wishlist as a title search -- correctly spelled, properly cased and punctuated. Actually, the punctuation was better than can be entered manually, given the contraction was added. I'm going to guess that the punctuation in the contraction is screwing something up, but that's just a guess.

Edit:

For the record, creating a Wishlist by hand worked -- so, assuming case does not matter and the one character didn't push the title over a length boundary, it does appear to be the "'" in the "It's".

[Jonathan_S]

Originally Posted by sinanju

I wanted to create a Season Pass for "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" a while back, but there were no upcoming episodes in the schedule. I used TiVo Search to find the show and took advantage of the option to create an autorecording Wishlist. Now that the show is in the schedule and findable via a title search, the Wishlist isn't recording anything.

TiVo Search created the Wishlist as a title search -- correctly spelled, properly cased and punctuated. Actually, the punctuation was better than can be entered manually, given the contraction was added. I'm going to guess that the punctuation in the contraction is screwing something up, but that's just a guess.

Edit:

For the record, creating a Wishlist by hand worked -- so, assuming case does not matter and the one character didn't push the title over a length boundary, it does appear to be the "'" in the "It's".

I did some testing and noticed the same issue with several more wishlists. It appears that TiVo Search's create wishlist function doesn't sanity check for special characters, which as you noticed causes wishlists that won't work. Editing the wishlist by hand to remove the special character (and then retyping any other characters that you had to erase) causes the wishlists to start working.


I've noticed it with apostrophes (like your issue), as well and colons ":" and ellipses "...", but I suspect it will happen with any character that isn't in the alphanumeric set that TiVo lets you manually select for wishlists.

(I haven't had a chance to test if it will choke on accented characters like "é" or "ñ". AFAIK TiVo still matches the unaccented version of them, 'e' or 'n', against the accented version in the guide data. But who knows how it'll handle them being auto-entered into a wishlist search string)

[Jonathan_S]

Further testing with special characters. TiVo Search's create wishlist feature didn't work correctly for any show with special characters in the title.

I searched through upcoming programming and found a selection of shows with special characters:
Barney & Friends
Are You Being Served?
Biz Kid$
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Ed, Edd 'n Eddy

* The ampersand, question mark, and apostrophe simply need to be dropped. They're ignored by wishlist searches
(but it needs to be careful to retain all whitespace around them, because that 1st example requires two spaces between the words for the wishlist to work).

* The hyphen needs to be replaced by a single space.

* The dollar sign is a weird one. In older software the letter 'S' would match '$', but that no longer works. However dropping doesn't work either.
Neither 'Kids' nor 'Kid' matches 'Kid$'. In my testing only 'Kid*' worked.

* And the period and comma are also weird. Nothing seemed to match them. I had to break the search string up into multiple keywords to get a working wishlist.
"E" ● "T" ● "the Extra Terrestrial" matched E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
"Ed" ● "Edd n Eddy" matched Ed, Edd 'n Eddy
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Also I noticed that some shows that I could find with the classic search weren't being found by the TiVo Search (beta).
And that even searching for shows with special characters is tricky because there's no way to type them.
For example: Déjà Vu. (because, in TiVo Search, it appears that 'e' doesn't match 'é' like it does for classic search or wishlists)

[sinanju]

Good work. Let's hope they're still reading this forum. I sent an email pointing to this thread to the beta email address, just in case.