How to edit text on screenscrapers

MisterBodge

Thanks...Works like a charm.

Clyde

But be sure to backup your edited gamelist.xml, because it may be overwritten the next time you scrape.

I'm not familiar with Skraper, so I don't know if it will write the complete gamelist anew every time like Selph's Scraper (in overwrite mode) and Skyscaper do. But backups are almost never a bad idea. 😉

MisterBodge

@Clyde Thanks, really wanted to use it for when I have a bunch a friends around. Thought it would be cool to change the text in games like Ghost and Goblins so it has their names in the game description.

simpleethat

@Clyde Skraper defaults to write a new list. I haven't really had occasion to see if it will work otherwise. I like to get my game selection completed and then do the scraping.

EDIT: It looks like Skraper does have the ability to update gamelists. It defaults to backup the existing and create a new one but you can also backup existing and update and several other things.

I really like it, there are a lot of customization options and the UI is fairly intuitive.

If anybody is interest you can check it out here it's currently only available for Windows (what I use) and Linux.

thelostsoul

If you edit the XML file with an text editor, make sure to not use any special characters: List of XML and HTML character entity references There are tools which will convert any text to such an XML conform "text", in example this one: ISO-8859-1 set or UTF-8 set.

simpleethat

@thelostsoul I always forget about that...

thelostsoul

@simpleethat Its a bit tedious to work with XML files directly. A few (nine) days ago I asked exactly this topic: How do you edit the gamelist.xml manually?

There are some interesting replies and tools users are using. I am currently building such a tool for myself too, because there is non for Linux. It will be very limited and compared to them barebones, but I can add new games without headache. I want to add new game mods/romhacks from time to time.

simpleethat

@thelostsoul Yeah, it's quite tedious to edit them directly (it's why I try to only scrape once and then do my edits). I did forget about your post. Going back to glance at it I was reminded about ARRM. Maybe I'll check that out to see if I like it.

@MisterBodge if you're on windows there is a tool called ARRM that another user created. I personally haven't played with it yet but people seem to like it.

Clyde

@simpleethat said in How to edit text on screenscrapers:

If anybody is interest you can check it out here it's currently only available for Windows (what I use) and Linux.

I tried Skraper yesterday, but for some reason its setup assistant didn't recognize my RetroPie options directory. I'm on Kubuntu 18.04 with mono-complete 4.6.2 installed like its website says. Maybe the beta 8 (or alpha on Linux as said there, although the download file is the same as for Windows) isn't tested thoroughly on Linux?

Anyway, that's off-topic here. I stopped my test because of the above, but maybe I'll open a topic about it here or in the ScreenScraper forum if I'll feel the need, but for now Skyskraper fulfills (nearly) all of my scraping needs. 👍

edit: I also plan to migrate to KDE Neon based on Ubuntu 20.04 in the near future, maybe the problem will vanish on the new system.

MisterBodge

@simpleethat I'm using the RPi 4. Thanks for the help got it working perfectly with the text editor on the OS.