HTML To Plain Text

A simple gem that provide code to convert HTML into a plain text alternative. Line breaks from HTML block level elements will be maintained. Lists and tables will also maintain a little bit of formatting.

• Line breaks will be approximated using the generally established default margins for HTML tags (i.e.

  tag generates two line breaks,

  generates one)
• Lists items will be numbered or bulleted with an asterisk
• 
  tags will add line breaks

• ---

  tags will add a string of hyphens to serve as a horizontal rule
• elements will enclosed in "|" delimiters
• tags will have the href URL appended to the text in parentheses
• Formatting tags like or will be stripped
• Formatting inside

   or <plaintext> elements will be honored

• Code-like tags like <script> or <style> will be stripped

HTML can also be converted to a Markdown approximation instead. In Markdown mode:

• Headings are prefixed with # characters
• Formatting tags like , , , and are converted to Markdown markers
• tags become Markdown links and tags become Markdown images

• content is prefixed with "> "

•  blocks become fenced code blocks
  

• Data tables are formatted as Markdown tables with a header separator row

Usage

require 'html_to_plain_text'

html = "<h1>Hello</h1><p>world!</p>"
HtmlToPlainText.plain_text(html) # => "Hello\n\nworld!"

HtmlToPlainText.markdown(html) # => "# Hello\n\nworld!"
# equivalent to HtmlToPlainText.plain_text(html, markdown: true)

Options

• show_links (default true) - Include link URLs and image sources in the output.
• markdown (default false) - Format the output as Markdown instead of plain text.
• all_tables (default false) - Format all tables as data tables. By default only tables with a non-zero border attribute or a thead or tbody element are formatted as data tables; other tables are assumed to be used for layout only and their cells are separated with spaces instead of "|" delimiters.
• ignore_nav (default false) - Suppress non-content elements from the output. When set, header, footer, and nav tags are omitted along with any elements that have a role attribute of navigation, banner, or contentinfo.
• selector (default nil) - A CSS selector limiting the output to matching elements. Only the contents of elements matching the selector are included in the output (e.g. selector: "#main, article"). Only elements within the body of the document are matched. An ArgumentError is raised if the selector is not a valid CSS selector.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "html_to_plain_text"

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install html_to_plain_text

Contributing

Open a pull request on GitHub.

Please use the standardrb syntax and lint your code with standardrb --fix before submitting.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.