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@xloem
Forked from glasslion/vtt2text.py
Last active October 9, 2023 16:17
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This script convert youtube subtitle file(vtt) to plain text.
"""
Convert YouTube subtitles(vtt) to human readable text.
Download only subtitles from YouTube with youtube-dl:
youtube-dl --skip-download --convert-subs vtt <video_url>
Note that default subtitle format provided by YouTube is ass, which is hard
to process with simple regex. Luckily youtube-dl can convert ass to vtt, which
is easier to process.
To conver all vtt files inside a directory:
find . -name "*.vtt" -exec python vtt2text.py {} \;
"""
import sys
import re
def remove_tags(text):
"""
Remove vtt markup tags
"""
tags = [
r'</c>',
r'<c(\.color\w+)?>',
r'<\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}\.\d{3}>',
]
for pat in tags:
text = re.sub(pat, '', text)
# extract timestamp, only kep HH:MM
text = re.sub(
r'(\d{2}:\d{2}):\d{2}\.\d{3} --> .* align:start position:0%',
r'\g<1>',
text
)
text = re.sub(r'^\s+$', '', text, flags=re.MULTILINE)
return text
def remove_header(lines):
"""
Remove vtt file header
"""
pos = -1
for mark in ('##', 'Language: en',):
if mark in lines:
pos = lines.index(mark)
lines = lines[pos+1:]
return lines
def merge_duplicates(lines):
"""
Remove duplicated subtitles. Duplacates are always adjacent.
"""
last_timestamp = ''
last_cap = ''
for line in lines:
if line == "":
continue
if re.match('^\d{2}:\d{2}$', line):
if line != last_timestamp:
yield line
last_timestamp = line
else:
if line != last_cap:
yield line
last_cap = line
def merge_short_lines(lines):
buffer = ''
for line in lines:
if line == "" or re.match('^\d{2}:\d{2}$', line):
yield '\n' + line
continue
if len(line+buffer) < 80:
buffer += ' ' + line
else:
yield buffer.strip()
buffer = line
yield buffer
def main():
for vtt_file_name in sys.argv[1:]:
txt_name = re.sub(r'.vtt$', '.txt', vtt_file_name)
with open(vtt_file_name, encoding='iso-8859-1') as f:
text = f.read()
text = remove_tags(text)
lines = text.splitlines()
lines = remove_header(lines)
lines = merge_duplicates(lines)
lines = list(lines)
lines = merge_short_lines(lines)
lines = list(lines)
with open(txt_name, 'w', encoding='iso-8859-1') as f:
for line in lines:
f.write(line)
f.write("\n")
if __name__ == "__main__":
main()
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