extract first line of html/text file pointed by TOC from epub

[michaelbr]

I have a script that can extract TOC from epub file, is there a way for me to retrieve first line or x chars from the html file pointed by TOC. My understanding is that each TOC entry point to a certain html file, so I'd like to open that html file and retried the 1st line or x chars from the 1st paragraph. I'm able to get the TOC using the following scripts (thanks to cas)

#! /bin/bash

# This script needs InfoZIP's unzip program
# and the xml2 tool from http://ofb.net/~egnor/xml2/
# and sed, of course.

EPUB_LIST=(my*.epub)

for f in "${EPUB_LIST[@]}"; do
    echo "$f:"
    unzip -p "$f" OEBPS/toc.ncx | 
        xml2 | 
        sed -n -e 's:^/ncx/navMap/navPoint/navLabel/text=:  :p'
    echo
done

[jhowell]

Are you doing this for a specific EPUB or are you trying to make something more general purpose? In general the TOC file doesn’t always have a specific name, or might not even be present in EPUB 3. And TOC entries don’t always point to the beginning of an XHTML file.

You may want to consider implementing this as a plugin of an EPUB editor such as calibre or sigil.