Export Spotify playlist to CSV, with Python

Objective: Looks up the Spotify HTTP link for each song in a text file, and outputs a CSV text file containing each song’s respective title, artist, and album.

Dependencies : Beautiful Soup 4

Limitations

1. Does not accept Unicode characters at all. This appears to be a limitation with urllib2.
   1. I will try some other URL fetcher with Unicode support in the future.
   2. This means that currently the input file (e.g. “spotify_http_list.txt” below) must be formatted in ANSI or ASCII, or urllib2 will throw the error:
      urllib2.URLError: <urlopen error unknown url type: http>
This shows up as URLError: <urlopen error unknown url type: http> in the debugger.
   3. The song title(s), artist(s), and album name(s) must also not have Unicode characters in them either, or you get an error like
      UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 96: ordinal not in range(128).
2. Spotify’s song info page via its HTTP link does not show more than two artists in a list of artists.

Notes

Copying and pasting the Spotify HTTP links directly into Microsoft Word result in hyperlinks showing up as {artist} – {title}, which is a much easier (and more accurate) way to export a Spotify playlist than the code here. The code here is thus mostly for educational purposes. (The code below does report album data, though!)

References : The snippet here is forked from another snippet by jclassi on GitHub, that exports Spotify playlists to Youtube.

Code

import urllib2
import argparse
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import csv

csvheader = ("title", "artist", "album")

def get_soup(url):
    page = urllib2.urlopen(url)
    return BeautifulSoup(page)

def spotify_parse(url):
    soup = get_soup(url)
    title = soup.find("a", id="title").get_text()
    artist = soup.find("div", id="artist").get_text().strip()
    album = soup.find("div", id="album").get_text().strip()
    return title, artist, album

def main():
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description = 'Export Spotify playlist to CSV.')
    parser.add_argument('-f', '--filename', help='File holding list of HTTP spotify URIs.', required = True)
    parser.add_argument('-o', '--output', help='CSV file containing title, artist, album.', required = True)
    args = vars(parser.parse_args())
    f = open( args['output'], 'wb')
    c = csv.writer(f, delimiter = ',', quotechar = '"')
    with open( args['filename'], 'rb') as input:
        c.writerow(csvheader)
        for line in input:
            meta = spotify_parse(line)
            c.writerow(meta)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Sample Input File

http://open.spotify.com/track/4FXj4ZKMO2dSkqiAhV7L8t

http://open.spotify.com/track/411rcI6KFOx1BYw8HY4shd

Example Usage : python export-spotify-playlist-to-csv-with-csv-library.py -f spotify_http_list.txt -o playlist_metadata.csv

Sample Output

title,artist,album
Evil Beauty,Blackmill,Reach For Glory
Starscapes,"TwoThirds, Veela and 1 more.Feint",Starscapes
Reprise - Original Mix,Feint,Feint EP1

Notes

1. Without the CSV library, a single field containing commas (such as a list of artists) will be output to multiple fields.