README.md

Process yt-dlp Extracted Subtitles Script

Description

This Python script is designed to process .vtt subtitle files obtained using yt-dlp from YouTube or similar platforms. It merges subtitles with overlapping segments and cleans the text by removing excess whitespace. The script outputs the processed subtitles into a new text file with a timestamped filename.

Features

• Subtitle Merging: Combines multiple subtitle entries into a single entry, considering overlaps.
• Text Cleaning: Cleans subtitle text by replacing newline characters and reducing multiple spaces to a single space.
• Output: Generates a cleaned and merged text file for each .vtt file in the specified directory.

Requirements

• Python 3
• webvtt-py library for parsing .vtt files

Usage

1. Obtain Subtitles: First, download the subtitles using yt-dlp with the following commands:
   • For automatic subtitles (machine-generated):

     yt-dlp --write-auto-sub --sub-lang ru --skip-download YOUR_URL
     

   • For manual subtitles (provided by the uploader):

     yt-dlp --write-subs --sub-lang ru --skip-download YOUR_URL
     

2. Script Execution: Place the script in a directory one level above the directory containing the .vtt files (or modify the path variable as needed). Run the script.

Output

The script outputs processed subtitles in a new file named with the pattern content_YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS.txt, where the timestamp corresponds to the script execution time.

Error Handling

Errors during the processing of .vtt files (such as malformed files) are logged to the console.

script.py

import os
import webvtt
import re
import json
import datetime

def merge_subtitles(subtitles):
    if not subtitles:
        return ""
    
    merged = subtitles[0]
    for subtitle in subtitles[1:]:
        overlap = next((j for j in range(min(len(merged), len(subtitle)), 0, -1)
                        if merged.endswith(subtitle[:j])), 0)
        merged += subtitle[overlap:]
    return merged

def clean_text(text):
    return re.sub(r"\s{2,}", " ", text.replace("\n", " "))

def process_subtitles_from_directory(path):
    content = {}
    for filename in os.listdir(path):
        full_path = os.path.join(path, filename)
        if filename.endswith(".vtt") and os.path.isfile(full_path):
            try:
                captions = [clean_text(caption.text) for caption in webvtt.read(full_path)]
                content[filename.split(" [")[0]] = merge_subtitles(captions).strip()
            except webvtt.MalformedFileError as e:
                print(f"Error processing {filename}: {e}")
    return content

def save_content_to_file(content, path, filename):
    with open(os.path.join(path, filename), "w") as f:
        for k, v in sorted(content.items()):
            print(f"# {k}", file=f)
            print("", file=f)
            print(v, file=f)
            print("", file=f)

def main():
    path = ".."
    content = process_subtitles_from_directory(path)
    timestamp = datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S")
    output_filename = f'content_{timestamp}.txt'
    save_content_to_file(content, path, output_filename)
    print(f"Processed subtitles saved to {output_filename}")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()