How can I Convert HTML to Text in C#?

Asked 2009-04-08T20:20:16.433

I'm looking for C# code to convert an HTML document to plain text.

I'm not looking for simple tag stripping , but something that will output plain text with a reasonable preservation of the original layout.

The output should look like this:

Html2Txt at W3C

I've looked at the HTML Agility Pack, but I don't think that's what I need. Does anyone have any other suggestions?

EDIT: I just download the HTML Agility Pack from CodePlex, and ran the Html2Txt project. What a disappointment (at least the module that does html to text conversion)! All it did was strip the tags, flatten the tables, etc. The output didn't look anything like the Html2Txt @ W3C produced. Too bad that source doesn't seem to be available. I was looking to see if there is a more "canned" solution available.

EDIT 2: Thank you everybody for your suggestions. FlySwat tipped me in the direction i wanted to go. I can use the System.Diagnostics.Process class to run lynx.exe with the "-dump" switch to send the text to standard output, and capture the stdout with ProcessStartInfo.UseShellExecute = false and ProcessStartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true. I'll wrap all this in a C# class. This code will be called only occassionly, so i'm not too concerned about spawning a new process vs. doing it in code. Plus, Lynx is FAST!!

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2 Answers

Assuming you have well formed html, you could also maybe try an XSL transform.

Here's an example:

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Xml.Linq;
using System.Xml.XPath;
using System.Xml.Xsl;

class Html2TextExample
{
    public static string Html2Text(XDocument source)
    {
        var writer = new StringWriter();
        Html2Text(source, writer);
        return writer.ToString();
    }

    public static void Html2Text(XDocument source, TextWriter output)
    {
        Transformer.Transform(source.CreateReader(), null, output);
    }

    public static XslCompiledTransform _transformer;
    public static XslCompiledTransform Transformer
    {
        get
        {
            if (_transformer == null)
            {
                _transformer = new XslCompiledTransform();
                var xsl = XDocument.Parse(@"<?xml version='1.0'?><xsl:stylesheet version=""1.0"" xmlns:xsl=""http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"" exclude-result-prefixes=""xsl""><xsl:output method=""html"" indent=""yes"" version=""4.0"" omit-xml-declaration=""yes"" encoding=""UTF-8"" /><xsl:template match=""/""><xsl:value-of select=""."" /></xsl:template></xsl:stylesheet>");
                _transformer.Load(xsl.CreateNavigator());
            }
            return _transformer;
        }
    }

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        var html = XDocument.Parse("<html><body><div>Hello world!</div></body></html>");
        var text = Html2Text(html);
        Console.WriteLine(text);
    }
}

answered 2012-06-07T02:09:20.153

Another post suggests the HTML agility pack:

This is an agile HTML parser that builds a read/write DOM and supports plain XPATH or XSLT (you actually don't HAVE to understand XPATH nor XSLT to use it, don't worry...). It is a .NET code library that allows you to parse "out of the web" HTML files. The parser is very tolerant with "real world" malformed HTML. The object model is very similar to what proposes System.Xml, but for HTML documents (or streams).

answered 2009-04-08T20:36:18.563

How can I Convert HTML to Text in C#?

2 Answers

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