I'm writing a WordPress plugin to create an eBook from a selected category in most major eBook formats. I would like to support MobiPocket since that's the format used by the Kindle but I'm not sure how to go about it. From what I've read .mobi files are actually Palm Resource Databases (PRC) but I haven't been able to find a PHP class to work with these.
I thought about using exec along with KindleGen but that would be undesirable as it would complicate initial setup. I've also thought about hosting a web service somewhere and using XML-RPC to accomplish this but that also complicates things.
My question is: is there a PHP class/library (PHP-only preferred) that can work with PRC or even better, a class that specialises in creating MobiPocket ebooks? (needs to be open source since I'm releasing under the GPL)
I've tried searching but haven't been able to find anything.
I don't know whether you're still looking for this PHP library, but just in case: https://github.com/raiju/phpMobi. This is a library that creates mobi files from html files.
It's should still be seen as an experimental version, but it should work without a problem for basic document with a few images.
Unfortunately not; however, the binary compiled format is an open specification available at:
http://www.mobipocket.com/dev/article.asp?BaseFolder=prcgen
The only direct way of transforming the uncompiled format is using the native XML functionality of PHP to create them and then invoking a compiler with exec, which I understand you don't want to do. If you go with this route, the link above also has details about this XML format.
You might want to try the mobiperl tools,
https://dev.mobileread.com/trac/mobiperl/wiki
Please note I haven't tested them yet. But they have been
around since at least 2007 so they should work well by now.
google "Mobiperl - Perl tools for handling MobiPocket files" to
find a thread on mobileread board discussing it. As a new
poster I can't put 2 hyperlinks into my reply.
Another tool I have recently found (but not yet tested), is: http://www.phpclasses.org/package/8173-PHP-Generate-Kindle-ebook-file-in-mobi-format.html#files
It is based upon KindleGen, and looks pretty straight forward to implement.
Related
I wonder if it's possible to view a PHP code source in a way that https://j11y.io/jquery/ shows a JQ code. Of course I mean reading code from a given file, not from websites code.
I'm not looking for programs like the PHPdocumentor.
Thank you in advance for any reasonable reply.
P.S. For perfectionists - I'm searching for a nice website or software (and I would prefer that option, so that I can be quite sure about the security), which will give me such a useful ability. I'm disturbed after using CTRL-F all the time ;)
I know that \Phar and \PharData exist, but I'm having some trouble with the methods they supply so far. I'm still having to detect the mime-type / file type by whatever means, before determining which Phar*::method() to use in an attempt to extract the archive and do work on the files it contains.
Is there a go-to, "easy-button" class that I could include (maybe some package available via composer) that handles this at a very high level? Or am I failing to use the Phar and friends properly or in need of re-RTM so far?
Basically, I want to do the following (it's a CLI script that I control for now, so security, while important with this type of thing, is on the backburner for now):
Detect that a file might be an archive of some kind.
Validate that it seems to be one of the following: .tar, .gz, .tar.gz, or .zip.
If so, attempt to extract the archive and then parse the content of it's actual files.
Is there an "easy-button" for this that I'm unaware of, or do I need to build some logic that guesses as best it can as to what type of archive it might be, and then try to use the appropriate Phar* method to attempt to extract it's files and do whatever work I need to on them?
I hope that makes sense the way I wrote it. I'm trying to avoid re-inventing the wheel for a mini-project here if someone has already figured all of this out basically.
So, while continuing to research this I ended up seeing my own (this) SO question in google search results, which annoys me for some reason. So just in case someone stumbles upon this looking for a good solution, I've since found a couple by searching https://packagist.org/search/?q=archive (go figure):
Here's a few of them that seem promising.
wapmorgan/UnifiedArchive:
wapmorgan/UnifiedArchive (packagist)
wapmorgan/UnifiedArchive (github source)
Features (at first glance):
Only has one requirement of pear/archive_tar (which includes a few
more utility classes also from pear).
It attempts to detect the filetype for you, so it could eliminate the need to do that on your own.
alchemy/zippy:
alchemy/zippy (packagist)
alchemy-fr/Zippy (github source)
Features (at first glance):
Code looks to have been very well designed.
Seems to integrate with Laravel and guzzle\guzzle (the popular php http client) in some way so that might be an advantage for some.
zetacomponents/Archive
zetacomponents/Archive (packagist)
zetacomponents/Archive (github source)
Features (at first glance):
It seems to be a pure php implementation? If so that's just awesome.
Last updated 15 days ago, so it's the most active of the three I mentioned.
Seems to be maintained by an organization as opposed to a single person.
It has the most downloads by far on packagist (when searching for "archive"), and though I haven't played with it yet, that's usually a good sign.
Disclaimer: I have only actually tried wapmorgan/UnifiedArchive as of this writing, and so far it's exactly what I was looking for.
Anyway, I hope this helps anyone who might stumble upon this question.
If you don't need pure php and if your code is running on a linux machine, a
exec('uncompress [-cfv] [file...]');
or a
exec('unzip filename.zip -d destination');
will extract the file and make it usable for php.
Of course you need to check the extension (zip, tar, etc) in order to call the right command
Background
I'm looking to create a wiki-style website.
First I took a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_software
Wanting to use PHP and being sceptic about using plain file storage the choice was lijited down to three alternatives:
Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware
PhpWiki
MediaWiki
Correct me if I'm wrong but all of these felt very heavyweight and pretty much overkill for a rather small project.
The question
My idea was then to use some kind of existing libraries and/or tools for the history, diff and markup parts but implementing the rest myself.
Do you know of any (good) libraries and/or tools like these?
Use an existing library like Markdown for marking up wiki text. Extend it if you have to. A diff algorithm for a wiki can be as trivial as you want it to be. First result on google for php diff showed an extremely simple algorithm that will probably get you started in the right direction.
PHP Diff Algorithm
PHP Markdown
Also don't forget about Github! There are all kinds of wiki projects written in PHP on there. Like this one!
I came across EtherPad but found out shortly afterwards that it has been shelved by Google.
Is there something else that I could use that allows people to collaborate on an online document? It must have version control.
Should I redevelop something instead?
Andre
Try Etherpad Lite, its much leighter than the original Etherpad
TypeWithMe is a slightly modified version of Etherpad. It's pretty darn good. Oh but, you need to view the document every once in a while or itll get wiped.
I'd recommend Google Docs. You can create new, upload existing, and collaborate online on files like documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings. Take a look at their Youtube page for a demonstration.
It seems like MobWrite http://code.google.com/p/google-mobwrite/ is a good solution. Just wish it had the versioning information etc that EtherPad had. Does anyone agree or have something better to embed in a PHP and mySQL website?
EtherPad is still available for buidling and deploying and it even have some seldom commits. If you want to use as an user, there are a few deployments of Etherpad (or perhaps modified versions of it) such as:
PiratePad
MoPad
Besides that, there is a quite comprehensive list of possibilities in this wikipedia entry for collaborative text editing software
Is there a native PHP wbxml API that can be used platform-independently? Perhaps a loadable module?
I have seen the pecl implementations but I have not been able to successfully work with the builds on win32 platforms.
I am not an expert, but what I found out there numbered two options, essentially.
One, the pecl library that you are having trouble with.
Two, I found WBXML encoder and decoder classes in Horde of all places. They might give you a starting point, and since they are open source, they might meet your needs quite nicely. Here is a link where I found them.
http://phpxref.com/xref/horde/lib/XML/WBXML/index.html
I don't know a huge amount about WBXML, but from what I can gather it's a binary-formatted XML file. I suppose at the simplest you could use the XML modules such as simpleXML to generate your XML document, output it as a string and then use PHP's built in file handling functions (fopen, fwrite, etc) to dump the string as binary data to a file. To reverse the process load the file as a string and have SimpleXML parse it.
However, without knowing the specific details of the WBXML format, I'm sure there's more to it tan that. You'd also have to implement the necessary code yourself, but as you could implement it in PHP itself that should make cross-platform portability a bit simpler to accomplish.
Not really an answer as such, I'm afraid, but I hope it gets you going in the right direction.