KindleUnpack (MobiUnpack): Extracts text, images and metadata from Kindle/Mobi files

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by siebert

Sorry, but using strings with delimiters would be a very unpythonic solution.

I agree with this. I hate the idea of concatenating arbitrary strings with some fixed delimiter.

I would have thought that making them all lists was actually quite a simple and clean solution, even if most of them end up as a list of just one item. Surely python handles single item lists fairly efficiently?

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by siebert

I'm almost done (the temporary file code was also removed), do you want me to just publish it when its finished, or do you want to take a look before (let me know your email address then)?

I think you might as well just post it here once you're done.

[siebert]

I'm thinking about redirecting the "Info:", "Warning:" and "Error:" output lines to stderr instead of stdout. Any thoughts on that?

Ciao,
Steffen

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by siebert

I'm thinking about redirecting the "Info:", "Warning:" and "Error:" output lines to stderr instead of stdout. Any thoughts on that?

Ciao,
Steffen

I don't suppose it would do any harm, so if it would make your use of it easier, I don't see why not.

[EDIT: I see KevinH does have a good reason for not redirecting these.]

[KevinH]

Hi,

Originally Posted by siebert

I'm thinking about redirecting the "Info:", "Warning:" and "Error:" output lines to stderr instead of stdout. Any thoughts on that?

Ciao,
Steffen

Please leave these as stdout. If you look, stdout has been modified to run completely unbuffered (to flush after every write).

This is done to support a front-end gui program that invokes this python script via a python subprocess library so that any progress or errors/ warnings are shown in the gui log window in real time.

For people with Python properly installed, they can double-click on the MobiUnpack.pyw program and use simple gui elements to run the program. This is much easier for some people.

Please see MobiUnpack.pyw from the google-code site I pointed you at earlier or I can post it for you if you like.

Thanks,

Kevin

[siebert]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Hi,
Please leave these as stdout. If you look, stdout has been modified to run completely unbuffered (to flush after every write).

Shouldn't it be possible to make stderr unbuffered, too?

By separating stdout and stderr the gui could ignore the stdout messages completely (or use them to show a progress bar instead) and only messages on stderr would be displayed in the log window, as they indicate something unusual the user should be aware of.

Ciao,
Steffen

[KevinH]

Hi,

On many systems stderr is always automatically unbuffered io. This is true for Mac OS X and Linux but I am not sure about Windows.

But you typically read them from separate pipes and can get "out of order" conditions that can be confusing to the user (ie. should you read and print the stderrr or stdout first when both pipes have data waiting). There might be a way to pipe them both to the same output when invoking the script via subprocess but that is typically OS dependent..

It is simply easier to keep everything going to stdout so that progress and any error messages can be seen in the log window which makes it nice/easy for bug reports from users who use the gui program that exists for them.

Thanks,

Kevin

ps. Here is the full tool set with the gui in case you want to modify or change it. It is very simplistic and meant to be basically independent of the underlying python script it invokes to the extent possible.

If python is in your path, you should be able to unzip and then double-click on MobiUnpack.pyw or MobiM22HTML.pyw and run the scripts (stored in the lib)

[siebert]

Hi,

here is mobiunpack.py version 0.29 with the following changes:

• NEW: Handle multiple metadata entries of the same type.
• NEW: Additional metadata tags added.
• CHANGED: Special handling of huge files is no longer required.
• CHANGED: Reenable skipping of known non-image sections.
• FIXED: Convert non-ascii filenames to utf-8 in opf.
• FIXED: StartOffset shouldn't create a visible index entry.

mobiunpack_0.29.zip

Ciao,
Steffen

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by siebert

Hi,

here is mobiunpack.py version 0.29 with the following changes:

• NEW: Handle multiple metadata entries of the same type.
• NEW: Additional metadata tags added.
• CHANGED: Special handling of huge files is no longer required.
• CHANGED: Reenable skipping of known non-image sections.
• FIXED: Convert non-ascii filenames to utf-8 in opf.
• FIXED: StartOffset shouldn't create a visible index entry.

Attachment 74742

Ciao,
Steffen

Thanks. It looks good. I didn't notice any special handling of the author tag, but I'll do some tests with the latest KindleGen. Perhaps it works properly with multiple author tags now.

[KevinH]

Hi Steffen,

I didn't notice metadata 404 anyplace in the code which I think is the Text To Speech (TTS) flag. We might want to add that so that people can see whether this is enabled or not.

Thanks for your great work on this.

Kevin

[siebert]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Thanks. It looks good. I didn't notice any special handling of the author tag, but I'll do some tests with the latest KindleGen. Perhaps it works properly with multiple author tags now.

mobigen/kindlegen accept multiple entries for some tags and ignores all but the first entry for other tags. The output of mobigen/kindlegen shows what metadata will be used for the generated book.

And multiple authors worked for me.

Ciao,
Steffen

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by siebert

here is mobiunpack.py version 0.29 with the following changes

Now copied back to my post on the first page of the thread: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...36&postcount=5

[naisren]

I tried every version one by one, and get happier then. 0.29 is better in many ways.
For the better, I report just bad result here.
words reflection works, but javascript function does not, pop error after mobi back using mobigen.
most images work, but some warnings about invalid images come out when using the 0.29 rendered and untouched opf by mobigen.

[siebert]

Originally Posted by naisren

words reflection works, but javascript function does not, pop error after mobi back using mobigen.

AFAIK only the Mobipocket Reader supports javascript, while the Kindle Devices and Apps don't, so I have no use for the javascript features in Mobipocket.

If someone finds out what needs to be changed I might fix it.

most images work, but some warnings about invalid images come out when using the 0.29 rendered and untouched opf by mobigen.

Warnings about invalid content or insufficient sizes? And is the exported image broken if you open it with an image viewer? Can you provide me the original mobi file for testing?

Ciao,
Steffen

[siebert]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Now copied back to my post on the first page of the thread: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...36&postcount=5

Great. Did you have success with the multiple authors test?

Ciao,
Steffen