Plugins

Plugins can be used to automate some of the workflow. For instance, the ebooklib.plugins.tidyhtml plugin automatically cleans HTML output for you. FootnotePlugin, for example, rewrites custom footnotes into EPUB3-style footnotes. Without these plugins, you would need to do the desired transformations before setting or getting content from your chapters.

There is a ebooklib.plugins.base.BasePlugin class which you need to extend. These are the methods you can override.

Method	Arguments	Description
before_write	book	Processing before book save
after_write	book	Processing after book save
before_read	book	Processing before book read
after_read	book	Processing after book read
item_after_read	book, item	Process general item after read
item_before_write	book, item	Process general item before write
html_after_read	book, chapter	Processing HTML before read
html_before_write	book, chapter	Processing HTML before save

Custom plugin

This is our use case. We have an online WYSIWYG editing system for editing the content of our books. In the editor, to link to another page, we use this syntax <a href=”../page/”>Our page</a>, but in the EPUB book we need to link to the page.xhtml file, for instance.

We could do the transformations manually, or we could write a plugin that does all the work for us. We override the html_before_write method. We parse the content of our chapter, find all links, replace them with the new href, and finally set the new content to the chapter.

try:
    from urlparse import urlparse, urljoin
except ImportError:
    from urllib.parse import urlparse, urljoin

from lxml import  etree

from ebooklib.plugins.base import BasePlugin
from ebooklib.utils import parse_html_string

class MyeLinks(BasePlugin):
    NAME = 'My Links'

    def html_before_write(self, book, chapter):
        try:
            tree = parse_html_string(chapter.content)
        except:
            return

        root = tree.getroottree()

        if len(root.find('body')) != 0:
            body = tree.find('body')

            for _link in body.xpath('//a'):
                _u = urlparse(_link.get('href', ''))

                # Let us care only for internal links at the moment
                if _u.scheme == '':
                    if _u.path != '':
                        _link.set('href', '%s.xhtml' % _u.path)

                    if _u.fragment != '':
                        _link.set('href', urljoin(_link.get('href'), '#%s' % _u.fragment))

                    if _link.get('name') != None:
                        _link.set('id', _link.get('name'))
                        etree.strip_attributes(_link, 'name')

        chapter.content = etree.tostring(tree, pretty_print=True, encoding='utf-8')

When you want to use it, just pass the list of plugins you want to use as an extra option to the write_epub method (also to the read_epub method). Plugins will be executed in the order they are defined in the list.

epub.write_epub('test.epub', book, {"plugins": [MyLinks()]})