Converting html to text with Python

You can use a regular expression, but it’s not recommended. The following code removes all the HTML tags in your data, giving you the text:

import re

data = """<div class="body"><p><strong></strong></p>
<p><strong></strong>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa</p>
<p>Consectetuer adipiscing elit. <a href="http://example.com/" target="_blank" class="source">Some Link</a> Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa</p>
<p>Aenean massa.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa</p>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa</p>
<p>Consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa</p></div>"""

data = re.sub(r'<.*?>', '', data)

print(data)

Output

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa
Consectetuer adipiscing elit. Some Link Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa
Aenean massa.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa
Consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa

The 'n' places a newline between the paragraphs.

from bs4 import Beautifulsoup

soup = Beautifulsoup(text)
print(soup.get_text('n'))

I was in need of a way of doing this on a client’s system without having to download additional libraries. I never found a good solution, so I created my own. Feel free to use this if you like.

import urllib 

def html2text(strText):
    str1 = strText
    int2 = str1.lower().find("<body")
    if int2>0:
       str1 = str1[int2:]
    int2 = str1.lower().find("</body>")
    if int2>0:
       str1 = str1[:int2]
    list1 = ['<br>',  '<tr',  '<td', '</p>', 'span>', 'li>', '</h', 'div>' ]
    list2 = [chr(13), chr(13), chr(9), chr(13), chr(13),  chr(13), chr(13), chr(13)]
    bolFlag1 = True
    bolFlag2 = True
    strReturn = ""
    for int1 in range(len(str1)):
      str2 = str1[int1]
      for int2 in range(len(list1)):
        if str1[int1:int1+len(list1[int2])].lower() == list1[int2]:
           strReturn = strReturn + list2[int2]
      if str1[int1:int1+7].lower() == '<script' or str1[int1:int1+9].lower() == '<noscript':
         bolFlag1 = False
      if str1[int1:int1+6].lower() == '<style':
         bolFlag1 = False
      if str1[int1:int1+7].lower() == '</style':
         bolFlag1 = True
      if str1[int1:int1+9].lower() == '</script>' or str1[int1:int1+11].lower() == '</noscript>':
         bolFlag1 = True
      if str2 == '<':
         bolFlag2 = False
      if bolFlag1 and bolFlag2 and (ord(str2) != 10) :
        strReturn = strReturn + str2
      if str2 == '>':
         bolFlag2 = True
      if bolFlag1 and bolFlag2:
        strReturn = strReturn.replace(chr(32)+chr(13), chr(13))
        strReturn = strReturn.replace(chr(9)+chr(13), chr(13))
        strReturn = strReturn.replace(chr(13)+chr(32), chr(13))
        strReturn = strReturn.replace(chr(13)+chr(9), chr(13))
        strReturn = strReturn.replace(chr(13)+chr(13), chr(13))
    strReturn = strReturn.replace(chr(13), 'n')
    return strReturn


url = "http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/25/us-air-strikes-islamic-state-oil-isis"    
html = urllib.urlopen(url).read()    
print html2text(html)

It’s possible to use BeautifulSoup to remove unwanted scripts and similar, though you may need to experiment with a few different sites to make sure you’ve covered the different types of things you wish to exclude. Try this:

from requests import get
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as BS
response = get('http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2284783.stm')
soup = BS(response.content, "html.parser")
for child in soup.body.children:
   if child.name == 'script':
       child.decompose() 
print(soup.body.get_text())

It’s possible using python standard html.parser:

from html.parser import HTMLParser

class HTMLFilter(HTMLParser):
    text = ""
    def handle_data(self, data):
        self.text += data

f = HTMLFilter()
f.feed(data)
print(f.text)

I liked @FrBrGeorge’s no dependency answer so much that I expanded it to only extract the body tag and added a convenience method so that HTML to text is a single line:

from abc import ABC
from html.parser import HTMLParser


class HTMLFilter(HTMLParser, ABC):
    """
    A simple no dependency HTML -> TEXT converter.
    Usage:
          str_output = HTMLFilter.convert_html_to_text(html_input)
    """
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.text = ''
        self.in_body = False
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)

    def handle_starttag(self, tag: str, attrs):
        if tag.lower() == "body":
            self.in_body = True

    def handle_endtag(self, tag):
        if tag.lower() == "body":
            self.in_body = False

    def handle_data(self, data):
        if self.in_body:
            self.text += data

    @classmethod
    def convert_html_to_text(cls, html: str) -> str:
        f = cls()
        f.feed(html)
        return f.text.strip()           

See comment for usage.

This converts all of the text inside the body, which in theory could include style and script tags. Further filtering could be achieved by extending the pattern of as shown for body — i.e. setting instance variables in_style or in_script.

There are some nice things here, and i might as well throw in my solution:

from html.parser import HTMLParser
def _handle_data(self, data):
    self.text += data + 'n'

HTMLParser.handle_data = _handle_data

def get_html_text(html: str):
    parser = HTMLParser()
    parser.text = ''
    parser.feed(html)

    return parser.text.strip()

gazpacho might be a good choice for this!

Input:

from gazpacho import Soup

html = """
<div class="body"><p><strong></strong></p>
<p><strong></strong>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa</p>
<p>Consectetuer adipiscing elit. <a href="http://example.com/" target="_blank" class="source">Some Link</a> Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa</p>
<p>Aenean massa.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa</p>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa</p>
<p>Consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa</p></div>
"""

Output:

text = Soup(html).strip(whitespace=False) # to keep "n" characters intact
print(text)

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa
Consectetuer adipiscing elit. Some Link Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa
Aenean massa.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa
Consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa

The main problem is how you keep some basic formatting. Here is my own minimal approach to keep new lines and bullets. I am sure it’s not the solution to everything you want to keep but it’s a starting point:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

def parse_html(html):
    elem = BeautifulSoup(html, features="html.parser")
    text = ''
    for e in elem.descendants:
        if isinstance(e, str):
            text += e.strip()
        elif e.name in ['br',  'p', 'h1', 'h2', 'h3', 'h4','tr', 'th']:
            text += 'n'
        elif e.name == 'li':
            text += 'n- '
    return text

The above adds a new line for 'br', 'p', 'h1', 'h2', 'h3', 'h4','tr', 'th'
and a new line with - in front of text for li elements

A two-step lxml-based approach with markup sanitizing before converting to plain text.

The script accepts either a path to an HTML file or piped stdin.

Will remove script blocks and all possibly undesired text. You can configure the lxml Cleaner instance to suit your needs.

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import sys
from lxml import html
from lxml.html import tostring
from lxml.html.clean import Cleaner


def sanitize(dirty_html):
    cleaner = Cleaner(page_structure=True,
                  meta=True,
                  embedded=True,
                  links=True,
                  style=True,
                  processing_instructions=True,
                  inline_style=True,
                  scripts=True,
                  javascript=True,
                  comments=True,
                  frames=True,
                  forms=True,
                  annoying_tags=True,
                  remove_unknown_tags=True,
                  safe_attrs_only=True,
                  safe_attrs=frozenset(['src','color', 'href', 'title', 'class', 'name', 'id']),
                  remove_tags=('span', 'font', 'div')
                  )

    return cleaner.clean_html(dirty_html)


if len(sys.argv) > 1:
  fin = open(sys.argv[1], encoding='utf-8')
else:
  fin = sys.stdin

source = fin.read()
source = sanitize(source)
source = source.replace('<br>', 'n')

tree = html.fromstring(source)
plain = tostring(tree, method='text', encoding='utf-8')

print(plain.decode('utf-8'))

I personally like Gazpacho solution by emehex, but it only use regular expression for filtering out the tags. No more magic. This means that solution keep text inside <style> and <script>.

So I would rather implement a simple solution based on regular expressions and use standard Python 3.4 library for unescape HTML entities:

import re
from html import unescape

def html_to_text(html):

    # use non-greedy for remove scripts and styles
    text = re.sub("<script.*?</script>", "", html, flags=re.DOTALL)
    text = re.sub("<style.*?</style>", "", text, flags=re.DOTALL)

    # remove other tags
    text = re.sub("<[^>]+>", " ", text)

    # strip whitespace
    text = " ".join(text.split())

    # unescape html entities
    text = unescape(text)

    return text

Of course, this does not error prove as BeautifulSoup or other parsers solutions. But you don’t need any 3rd party package.

from html.parser import HTMLParser

class HTMLFilter(HTMLParser):
    text = ''
    def handle_data(self, data):
        self.text += f'{data}n'

def html2text(html):
    filter = HTMLFilter()
    filter.feed(html)

    return filter.text

content = html2text(content_temp)

I encountered the same problem using Scrapy you may try adding this to settings.py

#settings.py
FEED_EXPORT_ENCODING = 'utf-8'

There is a library called inscripts really simple and light and can get its input from a file or directly from an URL:

from inscriptis import get_text
text = get_text(html)
print(text)

The output is:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean
commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa

Consectetuer adipiscing elit. Some Link Aenean commodo ligula eget
dolor. Aenean massa

Aenean massa.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing
elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean
commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa

Consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor.
Aenean massa

I don’t know who wrote this Library but, bless his/her heart.

An updated answer based on Andreas’ answer.

def parse_html(html):
    elem = BeautifulSoup(html, features="html.parser")
    text = ''
    for e in elem.descendants:
        if isinstance(e, str):
            text += e.get_text().strip()
        elif e.name in ['span']:
            text += ' '
        elif e.name in ['br',  'p', 'h1', 'h2', 'h3', 'h4', 'tr', 'th', 'div']:
            text += 'n'
        elif e.name == 'li':
            text += 'n- '
    return text

Why? Some XML code was still leaking inside, spans were stripped and didnt have enough space, and divs sometimes require more line breaks. Everything else is the same.