How extract meaningful text from HTML

Question

I would like to parse a html page and extract the meaningful text from it. Anyone knows some good algorithms to do this?

I develop my applications on Rails, but I think ruby is a bit slow in this, so I think if exists some good library in c for this it would be appropriate.

Thanks!!

PD: Please do not recommend anything with java

UPDATE: I found this link text

Sadly, is in python

Answer 1

Use Nokogiri, which is fast and written in C, for Ruby.

(Using regexp to parse recursive expressions like HTML is notoriously difficult and error prone and I would not go down that path. I only mention this in the answer as this issue seems to crop up again and again.)

With a real parser like for instance Nokogiri mentioned above, you also get the added benefit that the structure and logic of the HTML document is preserved, and sometimes you really need those clues.