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Extracting text from HTML file using Python

Asked 2008-11-30T02:28:04.640
346

I'd like to extract the text from an HTML file using Python. I want essentially the same output I would get if I copied the text from a browser and pasted it into notepad.

I'd like something more robust than using regular expressions that may fail on poorly formed HTML. I've seen many people recommend Beautiful Soup, but I've had a few problems using it. For one, it picked up unwanted text, such as JavaScript source. Also, it did not interpret HTML entities. For example, I would expect ' in HTML source to be converted to an apostrophe in text, just as if I'd pasted the browser content into notepad.

Update html2text looks promising. It handles HTML entities correctly and ignores JavaScript. However, it does not exactly produce plain text; it produces markdown that would then have to be turned into plain text. It comes with no examples or documentation, but the code looks clean.

Related questions:

python html text html-content-extraction
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1 Answer

58

Found myself facing just the same problem today. I wrote a very simple HTML parser to strip incoming content of all markups, returning the remaining text with only a minimum of formatting.

from HTMLParser import HTMLParser
from re import sub
from sys import stderr
from traceback import print_exc

class _DeHTMLParser(HTMLParser):
    def __init__(self):
        HTMLParser.__init__(self)
        self.__text = []

    def handle_data(self, data):
        text = data.strip()
        if len(text) > 0:
            text = sub('[ \t\r\n]+', ' ', text)
            self.__text.append(text + ' ')

    def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
        if tag == 'p':
            self.__text.append('\n\n')
        elif tag == 'br':
            self.__text.append('\n')

    def handle_startendtag(self, tag, attrs):
        if tag == 'br':
            self.__text.append('\n\n')

    def text(self):
        return ''.join(self.__text).strip()


def dehtml(text):
    try:
        parser = _DeHTMLParser()
        parser.feed(text)
        parser.close()
        return parser.text()
    except:
        print_exc(file=stderr)
        return text


def main():
    text = r'''
        <html>
            <body>
                <b>Project:</b> DeHTML<br>
                <b>Description</b>:<br>
                This small script is intended to allow conversion from HTML markup to 
                plain text.
            </body>
        </html>
    '''
    print(dehtml(text))


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()
answered 2010-10-21T13:14:38.610

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