HTML to Plain Text in Python
Extract plain text from HTML in Python using BeautifulSoup, html2text, and the standard library.
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Tags: HTML to text Python, BeautifulSoup text extraction, Python html2text
HTML to Plain Text in Python Extracting plain text from HTML is a routine task in web scraping, content pipelines, email processing, and NLP preprocessing. Python offers three main approaches: BeautifulSoup for general extraction, html2text for Markdown-preserving conversion, and the standard library's for dependency-free pipelines. --- When ?You Need HTML-to-Text Conversion? Web scraping: extract article body from a crawled page Email processing: strip HTML from MIME multipart messages NLP / ML: tokenize or embed text without HTML noise Search indexing: build a plain-text corpus from a CMS export Content auditing: compare text across pages without markup interference What methods are available1: BeautifulSoup (Recommended for General Use)? Preserving Paragraph Breaks doesn't…
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I extract text from HTML in Python?
Install BeautifulSoup4 (`pip install beautifulsoup4`) and call `BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser').get_text(separator=' ', strip=True)`. For Markdown-preserving extraction where headings and links are retained, use the `html2text` package instead.
What is html2text in Python?
html2text is a Python library by Aaron Swartz that converts HTML to Markdown-formatted plain text. It preserves headings, bold, italics, and links as Markdown syntax while stripping all other HTML tags. Install with `pip install html2text`.
How do I use BeautifulSoup get_text()?
After parsing with `soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')`, call `soup.get_text(separator='\n', strip=True)`. The `separator` argument inserts a string between each extracted text chunk; `strip=True` removes leading/trailing whitespace from each chunk.
How do I strip HTML tags with regex in Python?
Use `re.sub(r'<[^>]+>', '', html)` to remove all HTML tags. This works for simple cases but breaks on malformed HTML, tags with attributes containing `>`, and CDATA sections. For production code, always prefer a parser over regex for HTML.
How do I preserve newlines when stripping HTML?
Pass a newline separator to get_text: `soup.get_text(separator='\n')`. For block-level tags, add a newline before them: iterate over `soup.find_all(['p','br','div','h1','h2'])` and insert `\n\n` as NavigableString before each element, then call get_text.
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