Extracting text from HTML file using Python
The best piece of code I found for extracting text without getting javascript or not wanted things :
from urllib.request import urlopen
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url = "http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2284783.stm"
html = urlopen(url).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, features="html.parser")
# kill all script and style elements
for script in soup(["script", "style"]):
script.extract() # rip it out
# get text
text = soup.get_text()
# break into lines and remove leading and trailing space on each
lines = (line.strip() for line in text.splitlines())
# break multi-headlines into a line each
chunks = (phrase.strip() for line in lines for phrase in line.split(" "))
# drop blank lines
text = '\n'.join(chunk for chunk in chunks if chunk)
print(text)
You just have to install BeautifulSoup before :
pip install beautifulsoup4
html2text is a Python program that does a pretty good job at this.
NOTE: NTLK no longer supports clean_html
function
Original answer below, and an alternative in the comments sections.
Use NLTK
I wasted my 4-5 hours fixing the issues with html2text. Luckily i could encounter NLTK.
It works magically.
import nltk
from urllib import urlopen
url = "http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2284783.stm"
html = urlopen(url).read()
raw = nltk.clean_html(html)
print(raw)