HTML to Plain Text with Ruby?

Question

Is there anything out there to convert html to plain text (maybe a nokogiri script)? Something that would keep the line breaks, but that\'s about it.

If I write som

Answer 1

Actually, this is much simpler:

require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'

puts Nokogiri::HTML(my_html).text

You still have line break issues, though, so you're going to have to figure out how you want to handle those yourself.

Answer 2

You want hpricot_scrub:

http://github.com/UnderpantsGnome/hpricot_scrub

You can specify which tags to strip / keep in a config hash.

Answer 3

I'm using the sanitize gem.

(" " + Sanitize.clean(html).gsub("\n", "\n\n").strip).gsub(/^ /, "\t")

It does drop hyperlinks though, which may be an issue for some applications. But I'm doing NLP text analysis, so this is perfect for my needs.