Danish TV Guide

Author einar

I’ve been living in Denmark for the past year as I study for my Masters in Computer Science at DTU. In my danish apartment I get a few danish, swedish and norwegian tv stations. I was getting tired of flipping through them at night and looking at the teletext for each of them to figure out if anything good was on, so I thought it would be nice to have my very own tv guide for exactly the stations I had available. And, being a big nerd, I decided to do something about it!

I’ve done a bit of screen scraping in Python but this was the first time I used the excellent Beautiful Soup library. It makes screen scraping a thousand times easier and handles badly formed html very well. So, I created a small script that screen scraped the tv listings for the stations I watch, and then spit out my own personal tv guide where the listings are aligned by time so I can quickly see for a given hour exactly what is on tv on all the stations. The script is simple, it has a base class TVListing and then a few different subclasses for different stations. Fortunately a few of them use the same format so I didn’t have to do a class for each station. It would be easy to customize this to add more stations or re-order them or whatever. The output from the script can be viewed here and it can be downloaded here or viewed syntax highlighted here.