I\'m looking for a way to turn this:
hello < world
to this:
hello < world
I could use sed, but
With Xidel:
echo 'hello < : " world' | xidel -s - -e 'parse-html($raw)'
hello < : " world
With perl:
cat foo.html | perl -MHTML::Entities -pe 'decode_entities($_);'
With php from the command line:
cat foo.html | php -r 'while(($line=fgets(STDIN)) !== FALSE) echo html_entity_decode($line, ENT_QUOTES|ENT_HTML401);'
An alternative is to pipe through a web browser -- such as:
echo '!' | w3m -dump -T text/html
This worked great for me in cygwin, where downloading and installing distributions are difficult.
This answer was found here
This answer is based on: Short way to escape HTML in Bash? which works fine for grabbing answers (using wget
) on Stack Exchange and converting HTML to regular ASCII characters:
sed 's/ / /g; s/&/\&/g; s/</\</g; s/>/\>/g; s/"/\"/g; s/#'/\'"'"'/g; s/“/\"/g; s/”/\"/g;'
Edit 1: April 7, 2017 - Added left double quote and right double quote conversion. This is part of bash script that web-scrapes SE answers and compares them to local code files here: Ask Ubuntu - Code Version Control between local files and Ask Ubuntu answers
Using sed
was taking ~3 seconds to convert HTML to ASCII on a 1K line file from Ask Ubuntu / Stack Exchange. As such I was forced to use Bash built-in search and replace for ~1 second response time.
Here's the function:
#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LineOut="" # Make global
HTMLtoText () {
LineOut=$1 # Parm 1= Input line
# Replace external command: Line=$(sed 's/&/\&/g; s/</\</g;
# s/>/\>/g; s/"/\"/g; s/'/\'"'"'/g; s/“/\"/g;
# s/”/\"/g;' <<< "$Line") -- With faster builtin commands.
LineOut="${LineOut// / }"
LineOut="${LineOut//&/&}"
LineOut="${LineOut//</<}"
LineOut="${LineOut//>/>}"
LineOut="${LineOut//"/'"'}"
LineOut="${LineOut//'/"'"}"
LineOut="${LineOut//“/'"'}" # TODO: ASCII/ISO for opening quote
LineOut="${LineOut//”/'"'}" # TODO: ASCII/ISO for closing quote
} # HTMLtoText ()