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

Another option is to run the html through a text based web browser and dump it. For example (using Lynx):

lynx -dump html_to_convert.html > converted_html.txt

This can be done within a python script as follows:

import subprocess

with open('converted_html.txt', 'w') as outputFile:
    subprocess.call(['lynx', '-dump', 'html_to_convert.html'], stdout=testFile)

It won't give you exactly just the text from the HTML file, but depending on your use case it may be preferable to the output of html2text.