

This can be done by changing the display_charset setting using the -o option: If the output is likely to be used on a machine other than the one where it is generated then it is probably desirable for the encoding to be specified explicitly. The default output encoding is chosen to match the locale. W3m -dump -cols=120 input.html > output.txt It can be changed using the -cols option:


The output width defaults to 80 characters. The output is written to stdout, but can be redirected to a file as in the example above. The input filename may be replaced by a URL if required. Normally w3m would operate as an interactive web browser, but it can be run non-interactively by means of the -dump option: W3m is recommended here because it has somewhat better support for handling tables, however the best choice may vary depending on the workload and preferred output style. One way to render HTML as text is to use a text-based web browser such as w3m, Lynx or Links. You wish to render it as a text file called output.txt. Suppose you have an HTML document called input.html. To render an HTML document as formatted plain text, taking account of markup where feasible. NET.Ubuntu (Lucid, Maverick, Natty, Precise, Trusty) I use UTF-8 as my default if no encoding can be determined, which as near as I can tell is a best practice with strings in. "]+content-type+charset=(+)", _īetween the raw bytes from the HTTP response, and the Content-Type HTTP header, we should be able to get something reasonable. '- if we can't get it from header, try the body bytes RegexOptions.IgnoreCase).Groups(1).ToString.ToLower StrCharset = Regex.Match(ContentTypeHeader, "charset=(+)", _ Private Function GetEncoding(ByVal ContentTypeHeader As String, _īyVal ResponseBytes() As Byte) As ''' "Content-Type: text/html charset=us-ascii" ''' Given the Content-Type header, try to determine string encoding Private Function CharsetToEncoding(ByVal Charset As String) _ ''' attempt to convert this charset string into a named.
#Get plain text from html how to
I found a code sample on Feroze Daud's blog that demonstrates how to semi-correctly detect the HTML encoding, as described by Joel.
#Get plain text from html software
A lot of things are like that in software you think you have it right, but you just haven't hit the edge conditions yet. It is right most of the time, which can lull you into a false sense of correctness. Wc.Headers.Add("Accept-Encoding", _strAcceptedEncodings)ĭim b() As Byte = wc.DownloadData(strUrl)Ĭlearly this isn't right. Wc.Headers.Add("User-Agent", _strHttpUserAgent) I was doing a naive, blanket UTF-8 conversion of this byte data, assuming I got back something of type "text/*": how can you read the HTML file until you know what encoding it's in?! Luckily, almost every encoding in common use does the same thing with characters between 32 and 127, so you can always get that far on the HTML page without starting to use funny letters. It would be convenient if you could put the Content-Type of the HTML file right in the HTML file itself, using some kind of special tag. The web server itself wouldn't really know what encoding each file was written in, so it couldn't send the Content-Type header. Suppose you have a big web server with lots of sites and hundreds of pages contributed by lots of people in lots of different languages and all using whatever encoding their copy of Microsoft FrontPage saw fit to generate. For an email message, you are expected to have a string in the header of the formĬontent-Type: text/plain charset="UTF-8"įor a web page, the original idea was that the web server would return a similar Content-Type http header along with the web page itself - not in the HTML itself, but as one of the response headers that are sent before the HTML page. How do we preserve this information about what encoding a string uses? Well, there are standard ways to do this. There are over a hundred encodings and above code point 127, all bets are off.
#Get plain text from html iso
Almost every stupid "my website looks like gibberish" or "she can't read my emails when I use accents" problem comes down to one naive programmer who didn't understand the simple fact that if you don't tell me whether a particular string is encoded using UTF-8 or ASCII or ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1) or Windows 1252 (Western European), you simply cannot display it correctly or even figure out where it ends. If you have a string, in memory, in a file, or in an email message, you have to know what encoding it is in or you cannot interpret it or display it to users correctly. I always wondered what those crazy foreigners were complaining about in their comments on my CodeProject articles, and now I know: there ain't no such thing as plain text: Over the last few months, I've come to realize that I had an ugly American view of strings.
