Builds epub book out of Paul Graham's essays.

pgessays.py

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""
Builds epub book out of Paul Graham's essays: http://paulgraham.com/articles.html
Author: Ola Sitarska <[email protected]>
Copyright: Licensed under the GPL-3 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html)
This script requires python-epub-library: http://code.google.com/p/python-epub-builder/
"""

import re, ez_epub, urllib2, genshi
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

def addSection(link, title):
    if not 'http' in link:
        page = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.paulgraham.com/'+link).read()
        soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
        soup.prettify()
    else:
        page = urllib2.urlopen(link).read()

    section = ez_epub.Section()
    try:
        section.title = title
        print section.title

        if not 'http' in link:
            font = str(soup.findAll('table', {'width':'435'})[0].findAll('font')[0])
            if not 'Get funded by' in font and not 'Watch how this essay was' in font and not 'Like to build things?' in font and not 'Want to start' in font and not len(font)<100:
                content = font
            else:
                content = ''
                for par in soup.findAll('table', {'width':'435'})[0].findAll('p'):
                    content += str(par)
            content = content.replace('<font size="2" face="verdana">', '')
            content = content.replace('</font>', '')
            content = content.replace('<font color="#999999">', '')
            content = content.replace('<font color="#000000">', '')
            for p in content.split("<br /><br />"):
                section.text.append(genshi.core.Markup(p))

            #exception for Subject: Airbnb
            for pre in soup.findAll('pre'):
                section.text.append(genshi.core.Markup(pre))

        else:
            for p in str(page).replace("\n","<br />").split("<br /><br />"):
                section.text.append(genshi.core.Markup(p))
    except:
        pass

    return section


book = ez_epub.Book()
book.title = "Paul Graham's Essays"
book.authors = ['Paul Graham']

page = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html').read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
soup.prettify()

links = soup.findAll('table', {'width': '435'})[1].findAll('a')
sections = []
for link in links:
    if not link.text.startswith('html'):
        sections.append(addSection(link['href'], link.text))

book.sections = sections
book.make(book.title)