isbnlib 3.3.3

Extract, clean, transform, hyphenate and metadata for ISBNs (International Standard Book Number).

Info

isbnlib is a (pure) python library, based in isbntools that provides several useful methods and functions to validate, clean, transform, hyphenate and get metadata for ISBN strings.

This short version, is suitable to be include as a dependency in other projects. Has a straighforward setup and a very easy programatic api.

Typical usage (as library):

#!/usr/bin/env python
import isbnlib
...

Main Functions

is_isbn10

Validate as ISBN-10.

is_isbn13

Validate as ISBN-13.

to_isbn10

Transform isbn-13 to isbn-10.

to_isbn13

Transform isbn-10 to isbn-13.

canonical

Keep only numbers and X. You will get strings like 9780321534965.

clean

Clean ISBN (only legal characters).

notisbn

Check with the goal to invalidate isbn-like.

get_isbnlike

Extract all substrings that seem like ISBNs.

get_canonical_isbn

Extract ISBNs and transform them to the canonical form.

EAN13

Transform an isbnlike string in an EAN13 number (validated canonical ISBN-13).

info

Get language or country assigned to this ISBN.

mask

Mask (hyphenate) a canonical ISBN.

meta

Gives you the main metadata associated with the ISBN, as service parameter you can use: wcat uses worldcat.org (no key is needed), goob uses the Google Books service (no key is needed), isbndb uses the isbndb.com service (an api key is needed), openl uses the OpenLibrary.org api (no key is needed), merge uses a mergeded record of wcat and goob records (no key is needed) and is the default option. You can get an API key for the isbndb.com service here. You can enter API keys with config.add_apikey(service, apikey). The output can be formatted as bibtex, msword, endnote, refworks, opf or json (BibJSON) bibliographic formats with dev.helpers.fmt.

editions

Return the list of ISBNs of editions related with this ISBN.

isbn_from_words

Return the most probable ISBN from a list of words (for your geographic area).

goom

Returns a list of references from Google Books multiple references.

doi

Return a DOI’s ISBN-A from a ISBN-13.

ren

Renames a file using metadata from an ISBN in his filename.

Install

From the command line enter (in some cases you have to preced the command with sudo):

$ pip install isbnlib

or:

$ easy_install isbnlib

For Devs

Main Namespaces

In the namespace isbnlib you have access to the core methods: is_isbn10, is_isbn13, to_isbn10, to_isbn13, canonical, clean, notisbn, get_isbnlike, get_canonical_isbn, mask, meta, info, editions, ren, doi, EAN13 and isbn_from_words.

You can extend the lib by using the classes and functions exposed in namespace isbnlib.dev, namely:

• WEBService a class that handles the access to web services (just by passing an url) and supports gzip. You can subclass it to extend the functionality… but probably you don’t need to use it! It is used in the next class.

• WEBQuery a class that uses WEBService to retrive and parse data from a web service. You can build a new provider of metadata by subclassing this class. His main methods allow passing custom functions (handlers) that specialize them to specific needs (data_checker and parser).

• Metadata a class that structures, cleans and ‘validates’ records of metadata. His method merge allows to implement a simple merging procedure for records from different sources. The main features can be implemented by a call to stdmeta function!

• vias exposes several functions to put calls to services, just by passing the name and a pointer to the service’s query function. vias.parallel allows to put theaded calls, however doesn’t implement throttling! You can use vias.serial to make serial calls and vias.multi to use several cores. The default is vias.serial, but you can change that in the conf file.

• bouth23 a small module to make it possible the code to run in bouth python 2 and python 3.

Merge Metadata

The original quality of metadata, at the several services, is not very good! If you need high quality metadata in your app, the only solution is to use polling & merge of several providers and a lot of cleanning and standardization for fields like Authors and Publisher. A merge provider is now the default in isbn.meta. It gives priority to wcat but overwrites the Authors field with the value from goob. Uses the merge method of Metadata and serial calls to services by default (faster for faster internet connections). You can change that by using vias’s other methods.

Helpers

In isbnlib.dev.lab you can find several methods, that we found very useful, some of then are only used in isbntools (full version).

Caveats

1. These classes are optimized for one-calls to services and not for batch calls.

2. If you inspect the library, you will see that there are a lot of private modules (their name starts with ‘_’). These modules should not be accessed directly since, with high probability, your program will break with a further version of the library!

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For the full library see isbntools

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