Gutenberg 0.3.1

Library to interface with Project Gutenberg

Overview

This package contains a variety of scripts to make working with the Project Gutenberg body of public domain texts easier.

The functionality provided by this package includes:

• Downloading texts from Project Gutenberg.

• Cleaning the texts: removing all the crud, leaving just the text behind.

• Making meta-data about the texts easily accessible.

Installation

This project is on PyPI, so I’d recommend that you just install everything from there using your favourite Python package manager.

pip install gutenberg

If you want to install from source or modify the package, you’ll need to clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/c-w/Gutenberg.git

Now, you should probably install the dependencies for the package and verify your checkout by running the tests.

cd Gutenberg

virtualenv --no-site-packages virtualenv
source virtualenv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.pip

pip install nose
nosetests

Usage

Downloading a text

from gutenberg.acquire import load_etext
from gutenberg.cleanup import strip_headers

text = strip_headers(load_etext(2701)).strip()
assert text.startswith('MOBY DICK; OR THE WHALE\n\nBy Herman Melville')

Looking up meta-data

from gutenberg.query import get_etexts
from gutenberg.query import get_metadata

assert get_metadata('title', 2701)  == 'Moby Dick; Or, The Whale'
assert get_metadata('author', 2701) == 'Melville, Hermann'

assert 2701 in get_etexts('title', 'Moby Dick; Or, The Whale')
assert 2701 in get_etexts('author', 'Melville, Hermann')

Limitations

This project deliberately does not include any natural language processing functionality. Consuming and processing the text is the responsibility of the client; this library merely focuses on offering a simple and easy to use interface to the works in the Project Gutenberg corpus. Any linguistic processing can easily be done client-side e.g. using the TextBlob library.