Extracting text from HTML file using Python

I'd like to extract the text from an HTML file using Python. I want essentially the same output I would get if I copied the text from a browser and pasted it into notepad.

I'd like something more robust than using regular expressions that may fail on poorly formed HTML. I've seen many people recommend Beautiful Soup, but I've had a few problems using it. For one, it picked up unwanted text, such as JavaScript source. Also, it did not interpret HTML entities. For example, I would expect ' in HTML source to be converted to an apostrophe in text, just as if I'd pasted the browser content into notepad.

Update html2text looks promising. It handles HTML entities correctly and ignores JavaScript. However, it does not exactly produce plain text; it produces markdown that would then have to be turned into plain text. It comes with no examples or documentation, but the code looks clean.

Related questions:

Filter out HTML tags and resolve entities in python
Convert XML/HTML Entities into Unicode String in Python

The best piece of code I found for extracting text without getting javascript or not wanted things :

from urllib.request import urlopen
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = "http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2284783.stm"
html = urlopen(url).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, features="html.parser")

# kill all script and style elements
for script in soup(["script", "style"]):
    script.extract()    # rip it out

# get text
text = soup.get_text()

# break into lines and remove leading and trailing space on each
lines = (line.strip() for line in text.splitlines())
# break multi-headlines into a line each
chunks = (phrase.strip() for line in lines for phrase in line.split("  "))
# drop blank lines
text = '\n'.join(chunk for chunk in chunks if chunk)

print(text)

You just have to install BeautifulSoup before :

pip install beautifulsoup4

html2text is a Python program that does a pretty good job at this.

NOTE: NTLK no longer supports clean_html function

Original answer below, and an alternative in the comments sections.

Use NLTK

I wasted my 4-5 hours fixing the issues with html2text. Luckily i could encounter NLTK.
It works magically.

import nltk   
from urllib import urlopen

url = "http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2284783.stm"    
html = urlopen(url).read()    
raw = nltk.clean_html(html)  
print(raw)

Found myself facing just the same problem today. I wrote a very simple HTML parser to strip incoming content of all markups, returning the remaining text with only a minimum of formatting.

from HTMLParser import HTMLParser
from re import sub
from sys import stderr
from traceback import print_exc

class _DeHTMLParser(HTMLParser):
    def __init__(self):
        HTMLParser.__init__(self)
        self.__text = []

    def handle_data(self, data):
        text = data.strip()
        if len(text) > 0:
            text = sub('[ \t\r\n]+', ' ', text)
            self.__text.append(text + ' ')

    def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
        if tag == 'p':
            self.__text.append('\n\n')
        elif tag == 'br':
            self.__text.append('\n')

    def handle_startendtag(self, tag, attrs):
        if tag == 'br':
            self.__text.append('\n\n')

    def text(self):
        return ''.join(self.__text).strip()


def dehtml(text):
    try:
        parser = _DeHTMLParser()
        parser.feed(text)
        parser.close()
        return parser.text()
    except:
        print_exc(file=stderr)
        return text


def main():
    text = r'''
        <html>
            <body>
                <b>Project:</b> DeHTML<br>
                <b>Description</b>:<br>
                This small script is intended to allow conversion from HTML markup to 
                plain text.
            </body>
        </html>
    '''
    print(dehtml(text))


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Extracting text from HTML file using Python

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