Export WordPress posts to plain text
I prefer to create and edit my posts in plain text. It’s a timeless format, and I find it nice to have an archive of posts lying around in plain text.
I wrote a little Python script which I used to extract an archive of my posts and pages into a bunch of files on my computer. In order to use it, you need to use “WordPress Importer” plugin. Export your posts and pages into a WXR format, and feed the file to the script.
Source code of the script is below (link for downloading the script is at the bottom of this post):
#!/usr/bin/env python
"""This script converts WXR file to a number of plain text files.
WXR stands for "WordPress eXtended RSS", which basically is just a
regular XML file. This script extracts entries from the WXR file into
plain text files. Output format: article name prefixed by date for
posts, article name for pages.
Usage: wxr2txt.py filename [-o output_dir]
"""
import os
import re
import sys
from xml.etree import ElementTree
NAMESPACES = {
'content': 'http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/',
'wp': 'http://wordpress.org/export/1.2/',
}
USAGE_STRING = "Usage: wxr2txt.py filename [-o output_dir]"
def main(argv):
filename, output_dir = _parse_and_validate_output(argv)
try:
data = ElementTree.parse(filename).getroot()
except ElementTree.ParseError:
_error("Invalid input file format. Can not parse the input.")
page_counter, post_counter = 0, 0
for post in data.find('channel').findall('item'):
post_type = post.find('wp:post_type', namespaces=NAMESPACES).text
if post_type not in ('post', 'page'):
continue
content = post.find('content:encoded', namespaces=NAMESPACES).text
date = post.find('wp:post_date', namespaces=NAMESPACES).text
title = post.find('title').text
date = date.split(' ')[0].replace('-', '')
title = re.sub(r'[_]+', '_', re.sub(r'[^a-z0-9+]', '_', title.lower()))
if post_type == 'post':
post_filename = date + '_' + title + '.txt'
post_counter += 1
else:
post_filename = title + '.txt'
page_counter += 1
with open(os.path.join(output_dir, post_filename), 'w') as post_file:
post_file.write(content.encode('utf8'))
post_counter += 1
print "Saved {} posts and {} pages in directory '{}'.".format(
post_counter, page_counter, output_dir)
def _parse_and_validate_output(argv):
if len(argv) not in (2, 4):
_error("Wrong number of arguments.")
filename = argv[1]
if not os.path.isfile(filename):
_error("Input file does not exist (or not enough permissions).")
output_dir = argv[3] if len(argv) == 4 and argv[2] == '-o' else os.getcwd()
if not os.path.isdir(output_dir):
_error("Output directory does not exist (or not enough permissions).")
return filename, output_dir
def _error(text):
print text
print USAGE_STRING
sys.exit(1)
if __name__ == "__main__":
main(sys.argv)
You can download the script from here: wxr2txt.py.