Extract your "Saved Stories" articles from the Apple News app on macOS (thanks to @eecue who wrote much of this)

news.py

"""Get your "Saved Stories" articles from Apple News

Thanks to Dave Bullock (https://github.com/eecue) who's idea this was and who wrote the extract_info_from_apple_news function

This script requires the following modules be pip installed:
    * bs4
    * requests

Save this script to a file called news.py and run it with Python 3.9 or later

For a more robust implementation of this, see: https://github.com/RhetTbull/apple-news-to-sqlite
"""


from __future__ import annotations

import io
import pathlib
import plistlib

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup


def get_reading_list_bplist() -> bytes | None:
    """Get saved articles info from Apple News

    Returns:
        bytes: The saved articles binary plist as a bytes object
        None: If the saved articles are not found
    """
    # The saved articles are stored in a binary file called reading-list
    # in the Apple News container (~/Library/Containers/com.apple.news)
    # The file contains at least two binary plist (bplist) files
    # embedded in it, the second of which contains the saved article IDs
    # (The first is a binary NSKeyedArchiver archive)
    # This function finds the second bplist file and returns it as a bytes object
    # or None if the file is not found

    news_container = (
        "~/Library/Containers/com.apple.news/"
        + "Data/Library/Application Support/com.apple.news/"
        + "com.apple.news.public-com.apple.news.private-production"
    )
    reading_list_file = (
        pathlib.Path(news_container, "reading-list").expanduser().absolute()
    )
    bplist_marker = b"\x62\x70\x6C\x69\x73\x74\x30\x30"  # bplist00

    reading_list = open(reading_list_file, "rb")
    length = reading_list.seek(0, io.SEEK_END)
    reading_list.seek(io.SEEK_SET)
    found = 0
    while window := reading_list.peek(1):
        if len(window) >= 8 and window[:8] == bplist_marker:
            found += 1
            if found == 2:
                return reading_list.read(length - reading_list.tell())
        reading_list.read(1)
    return None


def get_article_info(reading_list: bytes) -> dict[str, dict[str, str]] | None:
    """Decode the saved article information from the binary plist"""
    return plistlib.loads(reading_list, fmt=plistlib.FMT_BINARY)


def extract_info_from_apple_news(news_id: str) -> dict[str, str]:
    """Extract the article URL, title, description, image, and author from Apple News"""

    # Construct the Apple News URL from the ID
    apple_news_url = f"https://apple.news/{news_id}"

    # Send a GET request to the Apple News URL and get the response HTML
    response = requests.get(apple_news_url)
    html = response.content.decode("utf-8")

    # Use BeautifulSoup to extract the URL from the redirectToUrlAfterTimeout function
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
    if script_tag := soup.find(
        "script", string=lambda t: "redirectToUrlAfterTimeout" in t
    ):
        url_start_index = script_tag.text.index('"https://') + 1
        url_end_index = script_tag.text.index('"', url_start_index)
        url = script_tag.text[url_start_index:url_end_index]
    else:
        url = None

    # Extract the og:title, og:description, og:image, and author meta tags
    if title_tag := soup.find("meta", property="og:title"):
        title = title_tag["content"]
    else:
        title = None

    if description_tag := soup.find("meta", property="og:description"):
        description = description_tag["content"]
    else:
        description = None

    if image_tag := soup.find("meta", property="og:image"):
        image = image_tag["content"]
    else:
        image = None

    if author_tag := soup.find("meta", {"name": "Author"}):
        author = author_tag["content"]
    else:
        author = None

    # Return the extracted information as a dictionary
    return {
        "url": url,
        "title": title,
        "description": description,
        "image": image,
        "author": author,
    }


if __name__ == "__main__":
    reading_list = get_reading_list_bplist()
    articles = get_article_info(reading_list)
    if articles is None:
        print("No saved articles found")
        exit(0)

    for article in articles.values():
        print(extract_info_from_apple_news(article["articleID"]))