Question

Is there any freely available library for PHP which parses a .mobi file to get the:

• Author
• Title
• Publisher
• Cover

Edit:

To everyone who thinks this is an exact duplicate of Does a PHP Library Exist to Work with PRC/MOBI Files, you’re obviously too lazy to read the questions.

That asker wants to know how to generate .mobi files using a PHP library. I want to know how to break apart, or parse, already created .mobi files to get certain information. Therefore, the solution to that question, phpMobi will not work because it is a script to generate .mobi files from HTML, not to parse .mobi files.

Answer 1

A very very very lame example, but if you get desperate, you may try something like this:

$data = file_get_contents("A Young Girl's Diary - Freud, Sigmund.mobi");

$chunk = mb_substr($data, mb_strpos($data, 'EXTH'), 512);
$chunks = explode("\x00", $chunk);
array_shift($chunks);

$chunks = array_filter($chunks, function($str){return preg_match('#([A-Z])#', $str) && mb_strlen($str) > 2;});

$chunks = array_combine(array('author', 'publisher', 'title'), $chunks);

print_r($chunks);

Output:

Array
(
    [author] => Freud, Sigmund
    [publisher] => Webarto
    [title] => A Young Girl's Diary
)

File used: http://freekindlebooks.org/Freud/752-h.mobi (edited Publisher metadata with Calibre)

File parsing is not even remotely easy or fun thing to do. Just take a look at this: http://code.google.com/p/xee/source/browse/XeePhotoshopLoader.m?r=a70d7396356997114b548f4ab2cbd49badd7d285#107

What you should be doing is reading byte by byte, but because there is no detailed documentation, I’m afraid that won’t be an easy job.

P.S. I haven’t tried to fetch cover photo.