I'm trying to create a epub uploader to iBook in python. I need a python lib to extract book information. Before implementing this by myself I wonder if anyone know a already made python lib that does it.
An .epub file is a zip-encoded file containing a META-INF directory, which contains a file named container.xml, which points to another file usually named Content.opf, which indexes all the other files which make up the e-book (summary based on http://www.jedisaber.com/eBooks/tutorial.asp ; full spec at http://www.idpf.org/2007/opf/opf2.0/download/ )
The following Python code will extract the basic meta-information from an .epub file and return it as a dict.
import zipfile
from lxml import etree
def get_epub_info(fname):
ns = {
'n':'urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:container',
'pkg':'http://www.idpf.org/2007/opf',
'dc':'http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/'
}
# prepare to read from the .epub file
zip = zipfile.ZipFile(fname)
# find the contents metafile
txt = zip.read('META-INF/container.xml')
tree = etree.fromstring(txt)
cfname = tree.xpath('n:rootfiles/n:rootfile/@full-path',namespaces=ns)[0]
# grab the metadata block from the contents metafile
cf = zip.read(cfname)
tree = etree.fromstring(cf)
p = tree.xpath('/pkg:package/pkg:metadata',namespaces=ns)[0]
# repackage the data
res = {}
for s in ['title','language','creator','date','identifier']:
res[s] = p.xpath('dc:%s/text()'%(s),namespaces=ns)[0]
return res
Sample output:
{
'date': '2009-12-26T17:03:31',
'identifier': '25f96ff0-7004-4bb0-b1f2-d511ca4b2756',
'creator': 'John Grisham',
'language': 'UND',
'title': 'Ford County'
}