Builds epub book out of Paul Graham's essays.

pgessays.py

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""
Builds epub book out of Paul Graham's essays: http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

Author: Ola Sitarska <ola@sitarska.com>
Copyright: Licensed under the GPL-3 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html)

This script requires python-epub-library: http://code.google.com/p/python-epub-builder/
"""

import re, ez_epub, urllib2, genshi
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

def addSection(link, title):
    if not 'http' in link:
        page = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.paulgraham.com/'+link).read()
        soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
        soup.prettify() 
    else:
        page = urllib2.urlopen(link).read()
        
    section = ez_epub.Section()
    try:
        section.title = title
        print section.title

        if not 'http' in link:
            font = str(soup.findAll('table', {'width':'455'})[0].findAll('font')[0])
            if not 'Get funded by' in font and not 'Watch how this essay was' in font and not 'Like to build things?' in font and not len(font)<100:
                content = font
            else:
                content = ''
                for par in soup.findAll('table', {'width':'455'})[0].findAll('p'):
                    content += str(par)

            for p in content.split("<br /><br />"):
                section.text.append(genshi.core.Markup(p))

            #exception for Subject: Airbnb
            for pre in soup.findAll('pre'):
                section.text.append(genshi.core.Markup(pre))
        else:
            for p in str(page).replace("\n","<br />").split("<br /><br />"):
                section.text.append(genshi.core.Markup(p))
    except:
        pass
    
    return section


book = ez_epub.Book()
book.title = "Paul Graham's Essays"
book.authors = ['Paul Graham']

page = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html').read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
soup.prettify()

links = soup.findAll('table', {'width': '455'})[1].findAll('a')
sections = []
for link in links:
    sections.append(addSection(link['href'], link.text))
    
book.sections = sections
book.make(book.title)

What deps does this have?

Quick fix - it should be width 435 now.

One should change '455' to '435' at lines 28, 33 and 59 for this code to work.

In order to get valid HTML (which is what .epub contains) you also need to remove the <font> tags (beyond just changing the table width to 435 as @gsdatta and @SergeAx said).

As of today April 12th, 2017 only 4 forks of this gist actually changed the code:

Forks that fix the table width and removes <font> tags:

• @james-ingold https://gist.github.com/james-ingold/16c64f94e212f88068ab3d55c53831a7

Forks that fix the table width (but doesn't remove <font> tags):

• @monoself https://gist.github.com/monoself/ce550b6567e557224429
• @aacook https://gist.github.com/aacook/06803e592e8fa6114e74

Very interesting fork – very large script that does a lot of stuff and is basically a rewrite:

• @goc9000 https://gist.github.com/goc9000/4287475

Added a fork with the

• new modern libs urllib3 and bs4
• width fix
• minor syntax changes