/mastercook-tools

Scripts for working with MasterCook's MX2 export format

Primary LanguagePerlMIT LicenseMIT

mastercook-tools

Scripts for working with MasterCook's MX2 export format

Overview

MX2, the popular recipe export format introduced in MasterCook 5 (1999), is not quite XML. It's close, but there are several errors, and the DTD included with the software is just plain wrong. In addition to fixing those problems, I've knocked together some Perl scripts to work with and clean up MX2 files collected from assorted Internet archives, such as the archived Mad's Recipes.

Files

  • mx2.dtd - working DTD to validate against, includes the img attribute introduced in recent versions, and handles the common error of putting the summary list at the end.

  • mx2toxml - convert to valid UTF-8 XML (uses xmllint to do the character-set conversion and double-check validity).

  • mx2fixdir - split up recipe directions that include embedded CRLF into separate directions, and migrate obvious notes to the Notes section (common in recipes originally exported to the text MXP format).

  • mx2cat - concatenate one or more MX2 files into a composite file, sorting them by name and removing any duplicates (detected by MD5 checksum). Exact duplicates are usually the result of exporting embedded recipes (<IngR ... code="R">) that are used more than once.

  • mx2grep - search one or more MX2 files for recipes matching all of the supplied regular expressions, in --name, --ingredient, or --anywhere. Also does the same sort/uniq that mx2cat does. Has -l option to just list the names of the matching recipes.

  • mx2ls - list the names of all recipes in one or more MX2 files.

  • mx2split - write out one MX2 file per recipe. Recombine with mx2cat after cleaning up duplicates and removing unwanted recipes.

  • mz2 - the MZ2 format required for uploads to mastercook.com is just a ZIP file containing an MX2 file, so this is a trivial Bash script to do that.

  • xml2md - convert every recipe in an MX2 file into a separate Hugo content file, suitable for my recipe theme. This one still needs a bit of work, but it does capture every field I've ever seen used in an MX2 file.

Notes

  • While mx2split, mx2toxml, and mz2 write to files, the rest write to STDOUT, and can read from STDIN.

  • Some MX2 files need manual edits before converting to XML. xmllint will let you know by barfing on them during the conversion.

  • MZ2 files downloaded from My Mastercook contain gratuitous placeholder images and a single-line MX2 file that violates their DTD more than usual. I strip the RcpE's img attribute and insert CRLF pairs to make it easier to de-dupe libraries, but I haven't created a variant DTD yet that copes with their new quirks, so you can't use xmllint --valid to verify their structure.

Other Tools

  • cb2cb - Windows Java app that converts between various formats. Good for quickly converting MXP to MX2, provided you uncheck all the options.