============
HTML to Text

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Extract text from HTML

Free software: MIT license

How is html_text different from .xpath('//text()') from LXML
or .get_text() from Beautiful Soup?

Text extracted with html_text does not contain inline styles,
javascript, comments and other text that is not normally visible to users;
html_text normalizes whitespace, but in a way smarter than
.xpath('normalize-space()), adding spaces around inline elements
(which are often used as block elements in html markup), and trying to
avoid adding extra spaces for punctuation;
html-text can add newlines (e.g. after headers or paragraphs), so
that the output text looks more like how it is rendered in browsers.

Install

Install with pip::

pip install html-text

The package depends on lxml, so you might need to install additional
packages: http://lxml.de/installation.html

Usage

Extract text from HTML::

>>> import html_text
>>> html_text.extract_text('<h1>Hello</h1> world!')
'Hello\n\nworld!'

>>> html_text.extract_text('<h1>Hello</h1> world!', guess_layout=False)
'Hello world!'

Passed html is first cleaned from invisible non-text content such
as styles, and then text is extracted.

You can also pass an already parsed lxml.html.HtmlElement:

>>> import html_text
>>> tree = html_text.parse_html('<h1>Hello</h1> world!')
>>> html_text.extract_text(tree)
'Hello\n\nworld!'

If you want, you can handle cleaning manually; use lower-level
html_text.etree_to_text in this case:

>>> import html_text
>>> tree = html_text.parse_html('<h1>Hello<style>.foo{}</style>!</h1>')
>>> cleaned_tree = html_text.cleaner.clean_html(tree)
>>> html_text.etree_to_text(cleaned_tree)
'Hello!'

parsel.Selector objects are also supported; you can define
a parsel.Selector to extract text only from specific elements:

>>> import html_text
>>> sel = html_text.cleaned_selector('<h1>Hello</h1> world!')
>>> subsel = sel.xpath('//h1')
>>> html_text.selector_to_text(subsel)
'Hello'

NB parsel.Selector objects are not cleaned automatically, you need to call
html_text.cleaned_selector first.

Main functions and objects:

html_text.extract_text accepts html and returns extracted text.
html_text.etree_to_text accepts parsed lxml Element and returns
extracted text; it is a lower-level function, cleaning is not handled
here.
html_text.cleaner is an lxml.html.clean.Cleaner instance which
can be used with html_text.etree_to_text; its options are tuned for
speed and text extraction quality.
html_text.cleaned_selector accepts html as text or as
lxml.html.HtmlElement, and returns cleaned parsel.Selector.
html_text.selector_to_text accepts parsel.Selector and returns
extracted text.

If guess_layout is True (default), a newline is added before and after
newline_tags, and two newlines are added before and after
double_newline_tags. This heuristic makes the extracted text
more similar to how it is rendered in the browser. Default newline and double
newline tags can be found in html_text.NEWLINE_TAGS
and html_text.DOUBLE_NEWLINE_TAGS.

It is possible to customize how newlines are added, using newline_tags and
double_newline_tags arguments (which are html_text.NEWLINE_TAGS and
html_text.DOUBLE_NEWLINE_TAGS by default). For example, don't add a newline
after <div> tags:

>>> newline_tags = html_text.NEWLINE_TAGS - {'div'}
>>> html_text.extract_text('<div>Hello</div> world!',
...                        newline_tags=newline_tags)
'Hello world!'

Apart from just getting text from the page (e.g. for display or search),
one intended usage of this library is for machine learning (feature extraction).
If you want to use the text of the html page as a feature (e.g. for classification),
this library gives you plain text that you can later feed into a standard text
classification pipeline.
If you feel that you need html structure as well, check out
webstruct <http://webstruct.readthedocs.io/en/latest/>_ library.

=======
History

0.7.0 (2025-02-10)

Removed support for Python 3.8.
Added support for Python 3.13.
Added type hints and py.typed.
CI improvements.

0.6.2 (2024-05-01)

Support deeper trees by using iteration instead of recursion.

0.6.1 (2024-04-23)

Fixed HTML comment and processing instruction handling.
Use lxml-html-clean instead of lxml[html_clean] in setup.py,
to avoid https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools/issues/2004

0.6.0 (2024-04-04)

Moved the Git repository to https://github.com/zytedata/html-text.
Added official support for Python 3.9-3.12.
Removed support for Python 2.7 and 3.5-3.7.
Switched the lxml dependency to lxml[html_clean] to support
lxml >= 5.2.0.
Switch from Travis CI to GitHub Actions.
CI improvements.

0.5.2 (2020-07-22)

Handle lxml Cleaner exceptions (a workaround for
https://bugs.launchpad.net/lxml/+bug/1838497 );
Python 3.8 support;
testing improvements.

0.5.1 (2019-05-27)

Fixed whitespace handling when guess_punct_space is False: html-text was
producing unnecessary spaces after newlines.

0.5.0 (2018-11-19)

Parsel dependency is removed in this release,
though parsel is still supported.

parsel package is no longer required to install and use html-text;
html_text.etree_to_text function allows to extract text from
lxml Elements;
html_text.cleaner is an lxml.html.clean.Cleaner instance with
options tuned for text extraction speed and quality;
test and documentation improvements;
Python 3.7 support.

0.4.1 (2018-09-25)

Fixed a regression in 0.4.0 release: text was empty when
html_text.extract_text is called with a node with text, but
without children.

0.4.0 (2018-09-25)

This is a backwards-incompatible release: by default html_text functions
now add newlines after elements, if appropriate, to make the extracted text
to look more like how it is rendered in a browser.

To turn it off, pass guess_layout=False option to html_text functions.

guess_layout option to to make extracted text look more like how
it is rendered in browser.
Add tests of layout extraction for real webpages.

0.3.0 (2017-10-12)

Expose functions that operate on selectors,
use .//text() to extract text from selector.

0.2.1 (2017-05-29)

Packaging fix (include CHANGES.rst)

0.2.0 (2017-05-29)

Fix unwanted joins of words with inline tags: spaces are added for inline
tags too, but a heuristic is used to preserve punctuation without extra spaces.
Accept parsed html trees.

0.1.1 (2017-01-16)

Travis-CI and codecov.io integrations added

0.1.0 (2016-09-27)

First release on PyPI.

Dependencies of html-text (2).
Dependency	Optional
lxml	false
lxml-html-clean	false

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html-text

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