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Convert HTML to plain text in Java

Asked 2010-10-12T02:59:20.003
11

I need to convert HTML to plain text. My only requirement of formatting is to retain new lines in the plain text. New lines should be displayed not only in the case of <br> but other tags, e.g. <tr/>, </p> leads to a new line too.

Sample HTML pages for testing are:

Note that these are only random URLs.

I have tried out various libraries (JSoup, Javax.swing, Apache utils) mentioned in the answers to this StackOverflow question to convert HTML to plain text.

Example using JSoup:

public class JSoupTest {

 @Test
 public void SimpleParse() {
  try {
   Document doc = Jsoup.connect("http://www.particle.kth.se/~lindsey/JavaCourse/Book/Part1/Java/Chapter09/scannerConsole.html").get();
   System.out.print(doc.text());

  } catch (IOException e) {
   // TODO Auto-generated catch block
   e.printStackTrace();
  }
 }
}

Example with HTMLEditorKit:

import javax.swing.text.html.*;
import javax.swing.text.html.parser.*;

public class Html2Text extends HTMLEditorKit.ParserCallback {
 StringBuffer s;

 public Html2Text() {}

 public void parse(Reader in) throws IOException {
   s = new StringBuffer();
   ParserDelegator delegator = new ParserDelegator();
   // the third parameter is TRUE to ignore charset directive
   delegator.parse(in, this, Boolean.TRUE);
 }

 public void handleText(char[] text, int pos) {
   s.append(text);
 }

 public String get
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2 Answers

1

You can use XSLT for this purpose. Take a look at this link which addresses a similar problem.

Hope it is helpful.

answered 2010-10-12T03:42:36.850
1

I would use SAX. If your document is not well-formed XHTML, I would transform it with JTidy.

answered 2010-10-12T03:58:09.777

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