Converts Unbound Bible formats into a plain text with no line breaks. Useful for preprocessing Bible text for NLP tasks.

unbound2plain.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
#Convert Unbound Bible Format into plain text, all one line. 

import os
import os.path
import sys
import re
from tempfile import mkstemp
from shutil import move

def unbound2plain(infile):
    fd, abs_path = mkstemp()
    with open(abs_path,'a') as tmp_file:
        with open(infile) as source:
            for line in source:
                if not line.startswith('#'):
                    line = re.sub(r'^[\d\sO]+\t','', line)
                    line = re.sub(r'\r\n$',' ',line)
                    tmp_file.write(line)
    source.close()
    tmp_file.close()
    os.close(fd)
    #replaces original file with new one
    os.remove(source.name)
    move(abs_path, infile)
    return

def main(infile):
    unbound2plain(infile)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    infile = sys.argv[1]
    main(infile)