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

In Python 3.x you can do it in a very easy way by importing 'imaplib' and 'email' packages. Although this is an older post but maybe my answer can help new comers on this post.

status, data = self.imap.fetch(num, '(RFC822)')
email_msg = email.message_from_bytes(data[0][1]) 
#email.message_from_string(data[0][1])

#If message is multi part we only want the text version of the body, this walks the message and gets the body.

if email_msg.is_multipart():
    for part in email_msg.walk():       
        if part.get_content_type() == "text/plain":
            body = part.get_payload(decode=True) #to control automatic email-style MIME decoding (e.g., Base64, uuencode, quoted-printable)
            body = body.decode()
        elif part.get_content_type() == "text/html":
            continue

Now you can print body variable and it will be in plaintext format :) If it is good enough for you then it would be nice to select it as accepted answer.