Converting HTML to Text

6 March 2007

html2text is a little command-line program that is available in many Linux distros including Gentoo and Ubuntu. As you might expect, it converts HTML to txt format.

To convert an html file to text, you can use:

html2text input.html

This outputs to the screen, to make it a file, you can use this:

html2text input.html > output.txt

However, another way is to use the following command:

html2text -o output.txt input.html

It has to be in that order, I got confused with this because I put -o output.txt at the end. Thanks to a guy called uniplex on IRC who solved all the mysteries.

What about if you want to convert a whole directory of html files into text files? Well the program does not come with a batch argument, however, we can fake a batch mode with this command:

for file in *.html; do html2text -o "${file%.*}.txt" "$file" ; done

I found that this can convert an extremely large amount of files in a very short time.

1 Al says...

Heh, that's a pretty useful utility. I've been doing a fair bit with converting websites to documents at work recently, so this will come in handy. I might combine it with wget to make it even easier. Fedora Core 5 doesn't appear to have any knowledge of it, but it's incredibly simple to compile from source by following the install file given. A note for anyone using Fedora/Redhat, the install file tells you to copy the man files to /usr/local/man/man1 and /usr/local/man/man5, but on FC/RH the correct location will be /usr/share/man/en/man1 and /usr/share/man/en/man5 Cheers.

Posted at 3:30 p.m. on March 6, 2007

2 michael says...

i used html2text a while but in the meantime i am great fan of w3m because it does the best rendering of frames. it can also be used on the commandline even within a pipe to do a text dump of a page.

Posted at 4:23 a.m. on July 8, 2008

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