Can you grep through ebooks? (feddit.nl)

submitted 1 week ago by skaarl@feddit.nl to c/linux@sopuli.xyz

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I was trying to do that but I noticed ls | grep searchterm just searches the book TITLES for searchterm. Is this possible, to search the text of ebooks?

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[-] thagoat@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 1 week ago

Try ripgrep-all.

[-] skaarl@feddit.nl 3 points 1 week ago

This looks pretty cool, thanks!

[-] thagoat@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 week ago

Glad to help!

[-] skaarl@feddit.nl 2 points 1 week ago

This tool is very powerful! Just what I needed, thanks again. Turns out you need pandoc 3+ and linux mint repo has 2.9, so after upgrading that rga started working, but it still throws this error from time to time:


parseSpine
Error: copying adapter output to stdout

Caused by:
    0: subprocess: Command { std: "pandoc" "--from=epub" "--to=plain" "--wrap=none" "--markdown-headings=atx", kill_on_drop: false }
    1: ExitStatus(unix_wait_status(16384))

I will have to keep looking into it, I'm not sure if this error stops the search in it's tracks.

[-] nesc@lemmy.cafe 6 points 1 week ago

ls lists files, if you pipe it to grep it will print matching lines with file names. Universally you can't grep through ebook content, but you can do it with epub, probably other zipped text formats using zipgrep or just unzipthem and grep unarchived files.

[-] skaarl@feddit.nl 2 points 1 week ago

Thanks!

[-] hellfire103@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 week ago

Sounds like a good time to mention that "Little Brother" by Cory Doctorow is available in GNU Info format (usually used for manpages).

[-] JASN_DE@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

Yeah, that's to be expected with ls as it only lists the folder contents. Which format do you have?

[-] skaarl@feddit.nl 2 points 1 week ago

epub, mobi and pdf

[-] sylver_dragon@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

It's going to be different for different file formats. For example, something like epub is going to be hard because the format is really just a zip file with a specific internal file structure. So, it's not really the .epub file you want to grep, but one of the files within that zip file you want to grep through. EBooks stored as PDFs could be a bit easier, as they are a monolithic file format with text often (though not always) stored just as plain text. However, the text streams can be encrypted and/or compressed (FlateDecode); so, there is no guarantee of seeing plain text.

I'm sure there are more formats, but I think you get the idea, how you would do a string search comes down to the actual file format. And some are not going to be easily greppable. It's not impossible, just not straight forward.