pyepub

An enhanced python library for dealing with EPUB2 files. Based on latest py-clave development release. NOTE: The development of pyepub is discontinued, every (eventual) effort will be transferred to the excellent yael instead.

Installation

Grab the latest stable release. Unpack the tarball and execute:

$ cd pyepub
$ python setup.py install

This will install the EPUB library in your current python environment as pyepub.

Basic usage

The code is as documented as I could. First import the EPUB class to use:

from pyepub import EPUB

And you're pretty much done. Since pyepub.EPUB inherits largely from zipfile.Zipfile, the inferface is quite familiar.

For example, you can create a new EPUB to write into using the "w" flag:

from pyepub import EPUB
epub = EPUB("newfile.epub", "w")

By default the epub is open-ed in read-only mode and exposes json-able dictionary of OPF properties.

>>> from pyepub import EPUB
>>> epub = EPUB("file.epub")
>>> epub.info
{"metadata":[...], "manifest": [...], "spine": [...], "guide": [...]}

The EPUB can be opened in append ("a") mode, thus enabling adding content. Due to the internal nature of zipfile stdlib module, a zipfile can't overwrite its contents. Thusly, a EPUB opened for append is never overwritten. The EPUB.__init__ constructor closes the local file and swaps the reference with a StringIO file-like object. To write the final file to disk, you can call the EPUB.writetodisk() method:

>>> from pyepub import EPUB
>>> epub = EPUB("file.epub","a")
>>> epub.close()  # not necessary, since .writetodisk() will close the file for you.
>>> epub.writetodisk("newfile.epub")
>>> epub.filename  # the "file" remains available at .filename property, and can be .read() as usual.
<StringIO.StringIO instance at 0x1004a8c20>

License

pyepub is distributed according to the MIT license. I don't like GPL-esque licenses, and I reinvented the wheel (since there already is a EPUB library in pypi) to avoid involving GPL in my projects.