new_contents: # the words "subtitles" and "captions" are used interchangeably
  
  import re
  
  def getVtt(fname):
      with open(fname) as f:
          content = f.readlines()
      content = [x.strip() for x in content] 
  
      p = re.compile('\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}.\d{3} --> \d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}.\d{3}')
  
      pureText = ""
      pay_attention = False
      for line in content:
          if p.match(line) != None:
              pay_attention = True   # gets past the metadata in the first few lines
          if pay_attention:
              #do whatever you want
              #print (line)
              if p.match(line) != None:
                  pass
              elif line == '':
                  pass
              else:
                  pureText += line + " "    
      return pureText
  
  # references:
  # http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3277503/how-do-i-read-a-file-line-by-line-into-a-list
  # http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11665582/regex-for-timestamp 
  # http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27805919/how-to-only-read-lines-in-a-text-file-after-a-certain-string-using-python
  
  
subject: Store perfectly working parser for one of the subtitle formats.