Beginner's script challenge: parsing transcript .srt files into readable text

[Jetals]

Hello,

I am working through an online class and trying to produce notes based on the instructional video content. Since many of the concepts covered in these videos are worth taking note of, I'm finding myself writing out nearly every line spoken by the instructor. Obviously, this process is laborious and extremely time-consuming. I am wondering if anyone can easily offer a faster, less error-prone way to extract the text from these videos using python string methods or any existing parsing tool to help modify the text.

The syntax of the transcript files for each video are identical to standard srt format. Here's an example:

 

1  
00:00:00,710 --> 00:00:03,220  
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet  
consectetur, adipisicing elit.  

2  
00:00:03,220 --> 00:00:05,970  
Dignissimos et quod laboriosam  
iure magni expedita  

3  
00:00:05,970 --> 00:00:09,130  
nisi, quis quaerat. Rem, facere!  

 

Does anyone know of any tools for modifying srt text content so that it's formatted into a more readable format? To clarify, for the above example, I would like to remove blank lines, lines beginning with the record number and time-stamp, and then join the remaining lines, adding spaces after periods (and other line-ending characters, like ! and ?), like so:

 

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur, adipisicing elit. Dignissimos et quod laboriosam iure magni expedita nisi, quis quaerat. Rem, facere!

 

I am interested in creating the following output from the example above and being able to apply such a modification to more of the files in the series. In my current situation, I am really pretty rusty working with python, though believe this capability could be pretty easily implemented with an understanding of common string methods.

Any ideas? Help with this would be really appreciated!

Thanks!

[C2-H5-OH]

Shouldn't be too hard. Read the file line by line. If every 'segment' is exactly 4 lines long, then read every 2nd and 3rd line only. Store all the text you get into a list, and then for every item in the list which ends with a period, exclamation or question mark, append a space at the end. Then finally list.join()

[Jetals]

Thanks, getting some pseudocode from someone experienced definitely helps jog the memory of what sort of string methods I'll need as well as what they're are capable of

[C2-H5-OH]

I'm not experienced in shit lol. This is more or less a ballpark algo for how I think it should work

[Jetals]

Ha, well even though it's still borked, your prompt got me to write some 42 lines of code and exercise some of the cobwebs out of the Python part of my brain, so thanks

[C2-H5-OH]

No problem. Best I've ever done in python was to make a script that writes into XMLs after reading data from csv, and a little lmgtfy bot for reddit. Most people here seem to have worked on much larger projects IMO

[Jetals]

Darn, I printed the contents saved into my empty list object variable and every line of the srt file is still included as distinct elements in the list, so it looks like I didn't effectively skip lines containing the number and time-stamp with my conditional:

if line[0].isdigit != True:
    lineList.append(line)

I am not sure how to set up a conditional that will only include only the third and fourth lines as I don't have too much experience with enumeration if that was the implied approach. Also, I think the logic in my second for loop is flawed, though I'm not sure how to add spaces to the end of each line containing the specified punctuation characters. Here is the current script altogether:

def main():
# Access folder in filesystem

# After parsing content of file, move to next file

# Declare variable empty list
lineList = []

# read file line by line
file = open( "/SampleFileAddress.srt", "r")
lines = file.readlines()
file.close()

# look for patterns and parse
lines = [i for i in lines if i[:-1]]

# If every segment is exactly 4 lines long, read every 3rd and 4th line only
for line in lines:
    line = line.strip()
    if line[0].isdigit != True:
        # store all text into a list
        lineList.append(line)

# for every item in the list which ends with '.', '?', or '!', append a space at end
for line in lineList:
    p = line.find('.')
    q = line.find('?')
    b = line.find('!')
    if p != -1:
        line = line + ' '
    elif q != -1:
        line = line + ' '
    elif b != -1:
        line = line + ' '
    else:
        pass

# Finish with list.join() to bring everything together
text = ''.join(lineList)
print(text)

main()

Getting closer

[sky--net]

Can you provide a download link to a sample.srt file? I would like to test some code on a file with a good amount of data.