how to convert HTML text to plain text?

Question

friend's I have to parse the description from url,where parsed content have few html tags,so how can I convert it to plain text.

Answer 1

Yes, Jsoup will be the better option. Just do like below to convert the whole HTML text to plain text.

String plainText= Jsoup.parse(yout_html_text).text();

Answer 2

Just getting rid of HTML tags is simple:

// replace all occurrences of one or more HTML tags with optional
// whitespace inbetween with a single space character 
String strippedText = htmlText.replaceAll("(?s)<[^>]*>(\\s*<[^>]*>)*", " ");

But unfortunately the requirements are never that simple:

Usually, <p> and <div> elements need a separate handling, there may be cdata blocks with > characters (e.g. javascript) that mess up the regex etc.

Answer 3

You can use this single line to remove the html tags and display it as plain text.

htmlString=htmlString.replaceAll("\\<.*?\\>", "");

Answer 4

Use Jsoup.

Add the dependency

<dependency>
  <!-- jsoup HTML parser library @ https://jsoup.org/ -->
  <groupId>org.jsoup</groupId>
  <artifactId>jsoup</artifactId>
  <version>1.13.1</version>
</dependency>

Now in your java code:

public static String html2text(String html) {
        return Jsoup.parse(html).wholeText();
    }

Just call the method html2text with passing the html text and it will return plain text.

Answer 5

Use a HTML parser like htmlCleaner

For detailed answer : How to remove HTML tag in Java

Answer 6

I'd recommend parsing the raw HTML through jTidy which should give you output which you can write xpath expressions against. This is the most robust way I've found of scraping HTML.

Answer 7

If you want to parse like browser display, use:

import net.htmlparser.jericho.*;
import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;

public class RenderToText {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        String sourceUrlString="data/test.html";
        if (args.length==0)
          System.err.println("Using default argument of \""+sourceUrlString+'"');
        else
            sourceUrlString=args[0];
        if (sourceUrlString.indexOf(':')==-1) sourceUrlString="file:"+sourceUrlString;
        Source source=new Source(new URL(sourceUrlString));
        String renderedText=source.getRenderer().toString();
        System.out.println("\nSimple rendering of the HTML document:\n");
        System.out.println(renderedText);
  }
}

I hope this will help to parse table also in the browser format.

Thanks, Ganesh

Answer 8

I needed a plain text representation of some HTML which included FreeMarker tags. The problem was handed to me with a JSoup solution, but JSoup was escaping the FreeMarker tags, thus breaking the functionality. I also tried htmlCleaner (sourceforge), but that left the HTML header and style content (tags removed). http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1518675/open-source-java-library-for-html-to-text-conversion/1519726#1519726

My code:

return new net.htmlparser.jericho.Source(html).getRenderer().setMaxLineLength(Integer.MAX_VALUE).setNewLine(null).toString();

The maxLineLength ensures lines are not artificially wrapped at 80 characters. The setNewLine(null) uses the same new line character(s) as the source.

Answer 9

I use HTMLUtil.textFromHTML(value) from

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.clapper</groupId>
    <artifactId>javautil</artifactId>
    <version>3.2.0</version>
</dependency>

Answer 10

Using Jsoup, I got all the text in the same line.

So I used the following block of code to parse HTML and keep new lines:

private String parseHTMLContent(String toString) {
    String result = toString.replaceAll("\\<.*?\\>", "\n");
    String previousResult = "";
    while(!previousResult.equals(result)){
        previousResult = result;
        result = result.replaceAll("\n\n","\n");
    }
    return result;
}

Not the best solution but solved my problem :)