How to Backup WeChat Public Articles to PDF with Python

Background

Content creators on WeChat worry about losing their articles, especially after investing significant effort and earning some income. Backing up these articles is crucial to prevent data loss.

Solution Overview

The author built a Python tool that packages WeChat public articles into PDF files, preserving images and a table of contents. The tool resolves the issue where images originally referenced by src attributes do not appear in PDFs by replacing those references so the images render correctly.

Key Code Snippets

def create_article_content(self, url, text):
    """文章内容"""
    str = '<span style="font-size:30px; padding:10px"><a href = "{}">点击查看公众号原文</a></span>'.format(url) + text.replace('src', 'src')
    return str

This function receives the article URL and HTML content, adds a hyperlink to the original article, and replaces the src placeholder so images are displayed in the PDF.

def creat_pdf_file(self, title, html_content):
    html = 'tmp.html'  # temporary HTML file
    with open(html, 'w', encoding='utf-8') as f:
        f.write(html_content)
    try:
        output_file = 'D:/gzh2/{}.pdf'.format(title)
        if not os.path.exists(output_file):
            pdfkit.from_file(html, output_file, configuration=self.config)
    except Exception as e:
        print(sys._getframe().f_code.co_name)
        print(e)
    finally:
        os.remove(html)

This creates a single‑article PDF by writing the HTML to a temporary file and converting it with pdfkit. It avoids duplicate files and cleans up the temporary file.

def creat_pdf_file(self):
    htmls = []
    for index, file in enumerate(self.html_contents):
        html = '{}.html'.format(index)
        with open(html, 'w', encoding='utf-8') as f:
            f.write(file)
        htmls.append(html)
    try:
        output_file = 'D:/gzh2/{}_的原创文章_第【{}-{}】篇.pdf'.format(self.gzh_name, (self.index_part - 1) * self.part_offset + 1, self.index_part * self.part_offset)
        if not os.path.exists(output_file):
            pdfkit.from_file(htmls, output_file, configuration=self.config)
    except Exception as e:
        print(sys._getframe().f_code.co_name)
        print(e)
    finally:
        self.html_contents = []
        for file in htmls:
            os.remove(file)

This version merges all articles into a single PDF for faster generation, though it may be less convenient for reading.

Important Notes

The tool relies on data captured with Charles (or similar) to obtain the article URLs and cookies. Since these values change per account, you must replace the example url and cookie with your own captured values.

Illustrations