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

Instead of the HTMLParser module, check out htmllib. It has a similar interface, but does more of the work for you. (It is pretty ancient, so it's not much help in terms of getting rid of javascript and css. You could make a derived class, but and add methods with names like start_script and end_style (see the python docs for details), but it's hard to do this reliably for malformed html.) Anyway, here's something simple that prints the plain text to the console

from htmllib import HTMLParser, HTMLParseError
from formatter import AbstractFormatter, DumbWriter
p = HTMLParser(AbstractFormatter(DumbWriter()))
try: p.feed('hello
there'); p.close() #calling close is not usually needed, but let's play it safe
except HTMLParseError: print ':(' #the html is badly malformed (or you found a bug)