ass UTF-16 subfile to UTF-8 plain text

ass-to-txt.py

# rfw/python-ass does the heavy lifting,
# but I needed to hack around UTF-16 encoded files,
# saving them back as UTF-8

import ass
import re
import sys

in_file = sys.argv[1]
out_file = re.sub('[as]+$', 'txt', in_file)
tmp_file = '/tmp/ass'
font_pattern = '\{[^\}]+\}'

with open(in_file, 'rb') as source_file:
  with open(tmp_file, 'w+b') as dest_file:
    contents = source_file.read()
    dest_file.write(contents.decode('utf-16').encode('utf-8'))

with open(tmp_file, "r") as f:
    with open(out_file, 'w') as final_file:
        doc = ass.parse(f)
        for e in doc.events:
            t = e.text
            t = t.replace('\N', "\n")
            t = re.sub(font_pattern, '' , t)
            t = re.sub('  ', ' ' , t).strip()
            final_file.write(t)
            final_file.write("\n")
            print t