hacky little script to convert plain text transcripts that have timestamps in the beginning of lines into documents that can be imported to otranscribe (https://otranscribe.com/)

convertToOtranscribe.py

"""
hacky little script to convert plain text transcripts
that have timestamps in the beginning of lines
into documents that can be imported to otranscribe

The file format it takes looks like:

 1:30 I mean yeah uhm
 1:32 I dunno

Or, more tech-y, the following regex needs to match each line: ^(\d+):(\d+)(.*)$
where (\d+) is minutes (\d+) is seconds and (.*)$ is the rest of the line.


"""

import re
import sys
import fileinput

lines = None

with open(sys.argv[1], 'r') as f:
    lines = f.readlines()
   

def convertLineToOTR(line):
    timeMatch = re.search("^(\d+):(\d+)(.*)$",line)
    minutes = int(timeMatch.group(1))
    seconds = int(timeMatch.group(2))
    timestring = str(minutes)+":"+str(seconds)
    text = timeMatch.group(3)
    allSeconds =  (minutes*60)+seconds
    return f'<p><span class=\\"timestamp\\" data-timestamp=\\"{allSeconds}\\">{timestring}</span>{text}<br/></p>' # double escape cause " will mess with JSON, so we need "\" in the output
    
new_lines = list(map(convertLineToOTR,lines)) #type cast cause return type of map is map

# how to build a JSON the terrible way
header = ['{"text":"']
footer = ['","media":"please reload file","media-time":"000"}']
fullList = header+new_lines+footer 

newFile = "".join(fullList)

sys.stdout.write(newFile)

No, this is not a good example for how to create a JSON (use https://docs.python.org/3/library/json.html)

If your files start somewhat different, e.g. with "(12:34) text text…" instead of "12:34 text text…", you need to change the regex (^(\d+):(\d+)(.*)$). Use https://www.regexpal.com/ or some other tool, so you do not need to run the script again and again.

If there is interest in this, I could invest an hour to make it work in javascript so you could convert using a website rather than a python script.