breadability

Reworked Python Readability parsing library.

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breadability - another readability Python port

I've tried to work with the various forks of some ancient codebase that ported readability_ to Python. The lack of tests, unused regex's, and commented out sections of code in other Python ports just drove me nuts.

I put forth an effort to bring in several of the better forks into one codebase, but they've diverged so much that I just can't work with it.

So what's any sane person to do? Re-port it with my own repo, add some tests, infrastructure, and try to make this port better. OSS FTW (and yea, NIH FML, but oh well I did try)

This is a pretty straight port of the JS here:

http://code.google.com/p/arc90labs-readability/source/browse/trunk/js/readability.js#82

Installation

This does depend on lxml so you'll need some C headers in order to install things from pip so that it can compile.

sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt-dev
pip install breadability

Usage

cmd line


::

    $ breadability http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide

Options

b will write out the parsed content to a temp file and open it in a browser for viewing.
d will write out debug scoring statements to help track why a node was chosen as the document and why some nodes were removed from the final product.
f will override the default behaviour of getting an html fragment ( ) and give you back a full document.
v will output in verbose debug mode and help let you know why it parsed how it did.

Using from Python


::

    from breadability.readable import Article
    doc = Article(html_text, url=url_came_from)
    print doc.readable


Work to be done
---------------
Yep, I've got some catching up to do. I don't do pagination, I've got a lot of
custom tweaks I need to get going, there are some articles that fail to parse.
I also have more tests to write on a lot of the cleaning helpers, but
hopefully things are setup in a way that those can/will be added.

Fortunately, I need this library for my tools:

- https://bmark.us
- http://readable.bmark.us

so I really need this to be an active and improving project.


Off the top of my heads todo list:

  - Support metadata from parsed article [url, confidence scores, all
    candidates we thought about?]
  - More tests, more thorough tests
  - More sample articles we need to test against in the test_articles
  - Tests that run through and check for regressions of the test_articles
  - Tidy'ing the HTML that comes out, might help with regression tests ^^
  - Multiple page articles
  - Performance tuning, we do a lot of looping and re-drop some nodes that
    should be skipped. We should have a set of regression tests for this so
    that if we implement a change that blows up performance we know it right
    away.
  - More docs for things, but sphinx docs and in code comments to help
    understand wtf we're doing and why. That's the biggest hurdle to some of
    this stuff.

Helping out
------------
If you want to help, shoot me a pull request, an issue report with broken
urls, etc.

You can ping me on irc, I'm always in the `#bookie` channel in freenode.


Important Links
----------------

- `Builds`_ are done on `TravisCI`_


Inspiration

python-readability_
decruft_
readability_