Export your LiveJournal blog data

Livejournal provides a method to export your posts as XML. However this has to be done manually for every month of your blog. Also comments are exported separately. I wrote this tool to make exporting more convenient.

You will need Python 3 to use it.

export.py

This script will do the exporting. Run it after you have provided cookies and years as described below. You will end up with full blog contents in several formats. posts-html folder will contain basic HTML of posts and comments. posts-markdown will contain posts in Markdown format with HTML comments and metadata necessary to generate a static blog with Pelican. posts-json will contain posts with nested comments in JSON format should you want to process them further.

auth.py

First of all you will have to log into Livejournal and copy values of cookies ljloggedin and ljmastersession to the file auth.py.

download_posts.py

Edit this file to specify the range of years you want to export. This script will download your posts in XML into posts-xml folder. Also it will create posts-json/all.json file with all the same data in JSON format for convenient processing.

download_comments.py

This script will download comments from your blog as comments-xml/*.xml files. Also it will create comments-json/all.json with all the comments data in JSON format for convenient processing.

Requirements

• html2text
• markdown
• beautifulsoup4
• requests
• lxml

Processing exported data separately

In the last lines of export.py there's a condition if True:. Change True to False to skip the downloading step and go directly to the processing of already downloaded data.