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Extracting text from HTML file using Python

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How do I extract HTML from text in Python?

To extract text from HTML file using Python, we can use BeautifulSoup. We call urllib. request. urlopen with the url we want to get the HTML text from.


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()