Simple Python Script for Extracting Text from an SRT File

srt_to_txt.py

"""
Creates readable text file from SRT file.
"""
import re, sys

def is_time_stamp(l):
  if l[:2].isnumeric() and l[2] == ':':
    return True
  return False

def has_letters(line):
  if re.search('[a-zA-Z]', line):
    return True
  return False

def has_no_text(line):
  l = line.strip()
  if not len(l):
    return True
  if l.isnumeric():
    return True
  if is_time_stamp(l):
    return True
  if l[0] == '(' and l[-1] == ')':
    return True
  if not has_letters(line):
    return True
  return False

def is_lowercase_letter_or_comma(letter):
  if letter.isalpha() and letter.lower() == letter:
    return True
  if letter == ',':
    return True
  return False

def clean_up(lines):
  """
  Get rid of all non-text lines and
  try to combine text broken into multiple lines
  """
  new_lines = []
  for line in lines[1:]:
    if has_no_text(line):
      continue
    elif len(new_lines) and is_lowercase_letter_or_comma(line[0]):
      #combine with previous line
      new_lines[-1] = new_lines[-1].strip() + ' ' + line
    else:
      #append line
      new_lines.append(line)
  return new_lines

def main(args):
  """
    args[1]: file name
    args[2]: encoding. Default: utf-8.
      - If you get a lot of [?]s replacing characters,
      - you probably need to change file_encoding to 'cp1252'
  """
  file_name = args[1]
  file_encoding = 'utf-8' if len(args) < 3 else args[2]
  with open(file_name, encoding=file_encoding, errors='replace') as f:
    lines = f.readlines()
    new_lines = clean_up(lines)
  new_file_name = file_name[:-4] + '.txt'
  with open(new_file_name, 'w') as f:
    for line in new_lines:
      f.write(line)

if __name__ == '__main__':
  main(sys.argv)

"""
NOTES
 * Run from command line as
 ** python srt_to_txt.py file_name.srt cp1252
 * Creates file_name.txt with extracted text from file_name.srt 

 * Script assumes that lines beginning with lowercase letters or commas 
 * are part of the previous line and lines beginning with any other character
 * are new lines. This won't always be correct. 
"""

I wrote this to create readable/printable text files to follow along with El ministerio del tiempo in Spanish. The SRT files are available at https://www.opensubtitles.org/es/ssearch/sublanguageid-spa/idmovie-192528

thanks for the help, there is problem as you open file with file_encoding but don't save with it it will cause error

Thanks. It works perfectly!

Hi.I cannot seem to get this to work. There are no error generated, but it doesn't output the formatted file.

run your code like:
python srt_to_txt.py file_name.srt cp1252

I adapted the script to use on mine. Thanks a lot!

https://github.com/shuantsu/srt_extract

run your code like:
python srt_to_txt.py file_name.srt cp1252

Thank you so much for this clarifying comment!