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

@PeYoTIL's answer using BeautifulSoup and eliminating style and script content didn't work for me. I tried it using decompose instead of extract but it still didn't work. So I created my own which also formats the text using the

tags and replaces tags with the href link. Also copes with links inside text. Available at this gist with a test doc embedded.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, NavigableString

def html_to_text(html):
    "Creates a formatted text email message as a string from a rendered html template (page)"
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
    # Ignore anything in head
    body, text = soup.body, []
    for element in body.descendants:
        # We use type and not isinstance since comments, cdata, etc are subclasses that we don't want
        if type(element) == NavigableString:
            # We use the assumption that other tags can't be inside a script or style
            if element.parent.name in ('script', 'style'):
                continue

            # remove any multiple and leading/trailing whitespace
            string = ' '.join(element.string.split())
            if string:
                if element.parent.name == 'a':
                    a_tag = element.parent
                    # replace link text with the link
                    string = a_tag['href']
                    # concatenate with any non-empty immediately previous string
                    if (    type(a_tag.previous_sibling) == NavigableString and
                            a_tag.previous_sibling.string.strip() ):
                        text[-1] = text[-1] + ' ' + string
                        continue
                elif element.previous_sibling and element.previous_sibling.name == 'a':
                    text[-1] = text[-1] + ' ' + string
                    continue
                elif element.parent.name == 'p':
                    # Add extra paragraph formatting newline
                    string = '\n' + string
                text += [string]
    doc = '\n'.join(text)
    return doc