How do I programatically fetch the live plaintext contents of an etherpad?

Question

This question came up on the etherpad-open-source-discuss mailing list and I thought it would be useful to have it here.

Hallerson

Answer 1

Just construct a URL like so and fetch it:

http://dtherpad.com/ep/pad/export/foo/latest?format=txt

That will get the live, plaintext contents of http://dtherpad.com/foo

For example, in PHP you can grab it with

file_get_contents("http://dtherpad.com/ep/pad/export/foo/latest?format=txt")

Note that that's just the "export to plain text" link that's provided in the Import/Export menu of every pad.

Hallerson

Argh, John McLear updated this for the latest version of Etherpad (thank you!) but someone else rejected it and now it's not letting me accept it. – Hallerson

Answer 2

A few other possibilities:

• From a browser, you can hit http://your-etherpad-server.com/ep/pad/view/padId/latest?pt=1
• From within the code of the collaborative editor (ace2_inner.js), use rep.alltext
• Within the Etherpad's javascript, use pad.text for the most recent version of pad.getRevisionText(rev.revNum) for a specified previous revision.

Halmahera

Answer 3

It seems that the javascript functions mentioned by Ari in his response are no longer present in the current versions of Etherpad as implemented on sites like http://etherpad.mozilla.org

However you can now simply use the following javascript function, within eherpad's javascript to get the text of the latest revision

padeditor.ace.exportText()

Roop

Answer 4

You can get the plaintext content of etherpad using jQuery as:

jQuery(document).ready(function(){
    jQuery('#export').click(function(){
        var padId = 'examplePadIntense';//Id of the div in which etherpad lite is integrated
        var epframeId = 'epframe'+ padId;
        var frameUrl = $('#'+ epframeId).attr('src').split('?')[0];
        var contentsUrl = frameUrl + "/export/txt";
        jQuery.get(contentsUrl, function(data) {
            var textContent = data;
        });
    });
});

Revetment

Answer 5

You can also use the getText HTTP api to retrieve the contents of a pad.

See my other answer for more details.

Yousuf