epub2text Documentation

A niche CLI tool to extract text from EPUB files with smart cleaning capabilities.

Contents:

• Installation
  • Requirements
  • Optional Dependencies
  • Basic Installation
  • Installation with Extras
  • Development Installation
  • Running Tests
  • Pre-commit Hooks
• Usage Guide
  • List Chapters
  • Extract Text
  • Show Metadata
  • Chapter Markers
  • Examples
• API Reference
  • Core Classes
  • Data Models
  • Text Cleaning
  • Text Formatting
  • Usage Examples
  • Module Index
• Changelog
  • [Unreleased]
  • [0.1.0] - 2025-01-01

Features

• Smart Navigation Parsing: Supports both EPUB3 (NAV HTML) and EPUB2 (NCX) navigation formats

• Selective Extraction: Extract specific chapters by range or interactive selection

• Flexible Output Formatting: - One paragraph per line with customizable separators - One sentence per line using spaCy NLP - Automatic line splitting at clause boundaries for long lines

• Smart Text Cleaning: - Remove bracketed footnotes ([1], [42]) - Remove page numbers (standalone, at line ends, with dashes) - Normalize whitespace and paragraph breaks - Preserve ordered lists with proper numbering

• Rich Interactive UI: Beautiful terminal output with tables and tree views

• Pipe-Friendly: Works as both CLI tool and Python library

• Nested Chapter Support: Handles hierarchical chapter structures

• Full Dublin Core Metadata: Extract all EPUB metadata fields

Quick Start

Install epub2text:

pip install epub2text

Extract text from an EPUB file:

epub2text extract book.epub

List chapters:

epub2text list book.epub

Show metadata:

epub2text info book.epub

Indices and tables

• Index

• Module Index

• Search Page