GNU program to do HTML to ASCII conversion?

stf92 · 08-04-2009, 09:36 PM

Hi.

I new the name of a program capable of converting HTML format to plain
ascii. However, I've quite fogotten it. I did 'apropos html | grep -i
ascii' or 'apropos ascii | less john' and I didn't find anything. Any
sugestion will be wellcome. Thanks for your time.

chrism01 · 08-05-2009, 12:29 AM

Possibly http://comp.eonworks.com/scripts/scripts.html
http://linux.softpedia.com/downloadTag/HTML2TXT
in fact google html2txt brings up a stack of options

rkirk · 08-05-2009, 08:20 AM

Well, if you specifically want ASCII, then you'll need to call the html2text(1) command with the -ascii flag.

Code:

html2text -ascii INPUTFILE.html > OUTPUTFILE.txt

But it's not a perfect solution. Anything between php brackets (<?php ?>) is left in the converted file. html2text seems to only remove obvious HTML tags, and this might not result in the kind of text files that you really want.

unSpawn · 08-05-2009, 09:16 AM

How about plain 'ol 'links -dump somefile.html > somefile.text'?

stf92 · 08-07-2009, 07:01 AM

links works fine, as it should be. Thanks and good bye.