Extracting text from HTML file using Python

Question

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.

Answer 1

NOTE: NTLK no longer supports clean_html function

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

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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)