Service guide encapsulation

A method for decoding service guide fragments comprising:

• (a) decoding a service guide delivery unit structure that is a transport container for said service guide fragments;
• (b) decoding a total number of said service guide fragments in said service guide delivery unit structure;
• (c) decoding fragment encoding fields, within said service guide delivery unit structure, each of which has a value signaling an encoding of a one of said service guide fragments corresponding to an index i,
• (d) decoding a fragment type field, within said service guide delivery unit structure, which signals a data type of said service guide fragment;
• (e) decoding an XML fragment field, within said service guide delivery unit structure, which is a string containing an actual XML data of said service guide fragment without a termination character,
• where a value of said fragment type field does not take a value of 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 when a value of one of said fragment encoding fields is equal to 0,
• wherein there is at least one value of said index i in a range of 0 to said total number for which said value of said fragment type field is equal to 0, 1, 2 or 3, and a value of said fragment encoding fields for said index i is equal to 0 in particular service guide delivery unit structure;
• (f) ignoring data in said XML fragment field with said fragment type field with value equal to 0 or greater than 3, for any value of said index i in said range 0 to said total number, when one of said value of said fragment encoding fields is equal to 0;
• and
• (g) decoding said service guide fragment by using said fragment type field and said XML fragment field.