Creating an EPUB from a Wordpress blog

Recently, I wanted to create epubs of some reading material, specifically some Wordpress-hosted blogs. Rather than implementing a separate script for each blog I wanted an epub from, I wrote a tool to figure it all out for me: trivialpub.

Usage is simple: provide a YAML config file, such as:

toc_url: https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/table-of-contents/
toc_parser: |
  [x.get('href') for x in soup.select('div.entry-content a') if 'class' not in x.attrs]

And trivialpub will do the rest:

$ ./trivialpub.py -c practicalguide.yaml 
Processing chapter https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/prologue/
Processing chapter https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/chapter-1-knife/
Processing chapter https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/chapter-2-invitation/
Processing chapter https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/2015/04/16/chapter-3-squire/
[...]
$ ls -l build/
total 9216
-rw-r--r--  1 acompton  admin  2004507 Nov 26 15:05 practicalguide.epub

I’ve included a number of examples in the repo, but basically, you either need to feed it a list of URLs to transform or a Python expression which, when eval’ed in context, will generate a list of URLs. (Yes, yes, eval() is the devil, I know.)

PRs and suggestions welcome.