Programming and technology blog

If you want to convert e-books to plain text ( txt ) on linux or other Unix-like systems, here are some command-line utilities that you can use along with their terminal commands: File type Text conversion utilities Examples .djvu 1. djvutxt 2. ebook-convert 1. djvutxt input.djvu output.txt 2. ebook-convert input.djvu output.txt .epub 1. epub2txt 2.  ebook-convert 3. unzip 1. epub2txt  input.epub > output.txt 2. ebook-convert input.epub output.txt 3.  unzip  -c input.epub > output.txt .doc 1. catdoc 2. textutil  (macOS) 3.  ebook-convert 1. catdoc input.doc > output.txt 2. textutil -convert txt input.doc -output output.txt 3. ebook-convert input.doc output.txt .pdf 1. pdftotext 2.  ebook-convert 1. pdftotext input.pdf output.txt 2. ebook-convert input.pdf output.txt NOTES: There is a caveat for  unzip : the generated...

UnicodeEncodeError : 'ascii' codec can 't encode character ' \ U0001f6d1 ' in position 2: ordinal not in range(128) This Python error might happen if you are having problems displaying non-ASCII characters in your terminal when running a Python script. This is mainly a problem with your locale settings used by your terminal. I provide two solutions to resolve it: Solution #1 : change your locale settings (best solution) Solution #2 : export  PYTHONIOENCODING=utf8  (temporary solution) Solution #1: change your locale settings (best solution) The best solution consists in fixing your locale settings since it is permanent and you don’t have to change any Python code. Append ~/.bashrc  or  ~/.bash_profile  with: export LANG = "en_US.UTF-8" export LANGUAGE = "en_US:en" You should provide your own UTF-8 based locale settings. The example uses the English (US) locale with the encoding UTF-8 . The locale -a  comma...