This little script downloads and parses the weekly print edition from The Economist, and builds an ebook in epub format.
You need Python3. Assuming you are in a virtualenv, use python, and pip in the following commands. Replace them with python3 and pip3 if your system-wide Python installation is 2.X.
NOTE: You will still most likely need to install the following libraries via your package manager:
- PIL: libjpeg-dev zlib1g-dev libpng12-dev
- lxml: libxml2-dev libxslt-dev
- Python Development version: python-dev
Once the above dependencies are satisfied:
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ python economist.py
This will fetch the latest print edition and build the ebook. Upon feching the issue, you'll see some metadata like issue number, section names, and article count. Give some time for all articles and images to download if this is the first time the issue is downloaded.
The resulting epub will be placed in the same directory, named the_economist_YYYY-MM-DD.epub, where YYYY-MM-DD represents the issue date.
The articles are cached in a SQLite database, which is meant to limit the number of requests made to The Economist.
This software is distributed under the BSD-style license found in the LICENSE file.