Watch out for non-breaking spaces on screen scrapes

I have been ripping DVDs I own to MP4 files for convenience of viewing on a tablet. Sometimes I need to get additional information about the episodes. For example I wanted to name the episodes of the Granada Sherlock Holmes TV series with the title of the tale for easy selection. For example 17-The_Musgrave_Ritual.mp4 is much preferred to 17.mp4.

On Wikipedia, episodes of many TV series are tabulated. You can highlight the contents of the table, and paste into a Libreoffice spreadsheet. This can then be exported as a CSV file for futher processing, e.g. with a Python program to generate a shell script that will rename the files the desired way.

This blog post is to point out that screen scraping will also capture the underlying characters in the tables, including extended characters in UTF-8 encoding. No surprise that this includes the non-breaking space:   or 0xA0 in 8-bit encoding or \uC2A0 in UTF-8 encoding. So when processing the CSV file, this needs to be converted to a space or your shell scripts won't work. Here's an example of the conversion needed.

datestring = row[5].replace(u"\xa0", " ")

This was to generate a touch -d 'date' episode.mp4 command. Touch kept telling me the date format was invalid until I investigated the date string and found a non-breaking space in it.

How to display Korean characters on openSUSE Leap 42.1

If you do a web search for this you will find a confusing amount of information for various distros. Some of it will relate to Korean keyboard input. At the moment I just want to display Korean characters instead of a square box with the Unicode; input comes later.

It turns out that the openSUSE developers have made it really easy. Here is the Reddit post that solved my problem: Korean fonts in openSUSE

There isn't much I can add to this solution except to mention that it installed a whole bunch of packages to cater for input methods (several, which I intend to explore later), KDE, Mozilla (Firefox and Thunderbird), Libreoffice, and even GIMP. So all those subsystems are sorted out in one fell swoop.

The other thing I want to mention is that other languages can be added to the secondary support list in YaST so presumably this solution will work for those.

I'm sorry if this doesn't help you with other distros. Hopefully your distro implemented a comprehensive solution in the configuration tool. Try that before you delve too deeply into the system.