a program to batch-convert html to plain text?

[urlwolf]

This is something that I needed long time ago and now I'm needing again.
I wish there were a program to batch-process html to text in an easy way,
stripping tables, ads, sitemaps, frames, etc and getting only article text.

Since there is a huge variability in how people use html and each site has a
different formatting, a general solution is difficult I guess. I used to use
perl + some parsing modules, but the solutions would break easily (a bit more
robust than simple regular expressions, but still).

Then, I think I moved to use dumps from text-based browers. 'Links' actually
supports frames, which is nice. The most popular one is 'lynx'.

http://links.sourceforge.net/download/binaries/

Still, it is a lot of work and it needs fine-tuning.

Do you know of any program that offers that, together with a GUI and some other
niceties? There must be one out there...
Thanks a lot

[369]

http://www.jetman.dircon.co.uk/software/web2text.html ; ?

[gjehle]

maybe try this one
http://html2text.sourceforge.net/

besides there should be enough perl modules too

and yes, links2 does it too

easy to get a batch script using those

[tinyvillager]

Source:http://www.highdots.com/html-code-export/


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[mouser]

nice find tinyvillager!
other good software from that company as well: http://www.highdots.com/

( sending a couple credits your way )

[urlwolf]

Thanks for the answers.
Here is what I have found after a brief test.
web2text was last updated... exactly at the end of last century. It leaves tags
behind and could not produce a passable output with the html that I used.

html2text is written in visual basic (of all possible languages, that would be
my LAST option for this job!) and is really slow. I can actually see a progress
bar moving when the conversion should be instantaneous. Not suited for batch
processing, but comes with code, so no problem. The output is ok, not great. For
example, it misses paragraph separators and returns a compact block of text. Not
ready for prime use.

html code export actually doesn't export to plain text. It looks very professional and
useful, but not for my purpose.

links (.99) for the terminal doesn't have flags to dump to text. It was lynx
actually, I had them confused. The win versions that I have tried didn't work
and it looks a bit like abandonware (most sites that hosted it are now broken
links, at least for windows)

So I still haven't found what I'm looking for
Thanks a lot