Ubuntu Manpage: html2text - an advanced HTML-to-text converter

name
synopsis
description
options
files
conforming to
restrictions
author
see also

NAME

       html2text - an advanced HTML-to-text converter

SYNOPSIS

       html2text -help
       html2text -version
       html2text  [ -unparse | -check ] [ -debug-scanner ] [ -debug-parser ] [ -rcfile path ] [ -style ( compact
       | pretty ) ] [ -width width ] [ -o output-file ] [ -nobs ] [ -ascii | -utf8 ] [ -nometa  ]  [  input-file
       ...  ]

DESCRIPTION

html2text reads HTML documents from the input-files, formats each of them into a stream of plain text
characters, and writes the result to standard output (or into output-file, if the -o command line option
is used).

If no input-files are specified on the command line, html2text reads from standard input. A dash as the
input-file is an alternate way to specify standard input.

html2text understands all HTML 3.2 constructs, but can render only part of them due to the limitations of
the text output format. However, the program attempts to provide good substitutes for the elements it
cannot render. html2text parses HTML 4 input, too, but not always as successful as other HTML
processors. It also accepts syntactically incorrect input, and attempts to interpret it "reasonably".

The way html2text formats the HTML documents is controlled by formatting properties read from an RC file.
html2text attempts to read $HOME/.html2textrc (or the file specified by the -rcfile command line option);
if that file cannot be read, html2text attempts to read /etc/html2textrc. If no RC file can be read (or
if the RC file does not override all formatting properties), then "reasonable" defaults are assumed. The
RC file format is described in the html2textrc(5) manual page.

Debian version of html2text also can do input and output recoding (see
/usr/share/doc/html2text/README.Debian for more info). html2text tries to fetch encoding from HTML
document. If encoding is not specified, you can use -ascii and -utf8 options. Output is converted to
user's locale charset (LC_CTYPE).

OPTIONS

-nometa
By default, Debian version of html2text use 'meta http-equiv' tag for input recoding. This option
cancels this behavior.

-ascii By default, when -nometa is supplied, html2text uses UTF-8 for the output. Specifying this option,
plain ASCII is used instead. To find out how non-ASCII characters are rendered, refer to the file
"ascii.substitutes".

-utf8 By default, when -nometa is supplied, html2text uses ISO 8859-1 for the input. Specifying this
option, UTF-8 is used instead (both for input and output). This option implies -nobs.

-check This option is for diagnostic purposes: The HTML document is only parsed and not processed
otherwise. In this mode of operation, html2text will report on parse errors and scan errors, which
it does not in other modes of operation. Note that parse and scan errors are not fatal for
html2text, but may cause mis-interpretation of the HTML code and/or portions of the document being
swallowed.

-debug-parser
Let html2text report on the tokens being shifted, rules being applied, etc., while scanning the
HTML document. This option is for diagnostic purposes.

-debug-scanner
Let html2text report on each lexical token scanned, while scanning the HTML document. This option
is for diagnostic purposes.

-help Print command line summary and exit.

-nobs By default, original html2text renders underlined letters with sequences like "underscore-
backspace-character" and boldface letters like "character-backspace-character". Because of issues
with UTF-8, Debian version of html2text doesn't produce backspaces, so this option really does
nothing.

-o output-file
Write the output to output-file instead of standard output. A dash as the output-file is an
alternate way to specify the standard output.

-rcfile path
Attempt to read the file specified in path as RC file.

-style ( compact | pretty )
Style pretty changes some of the default values of the formatting parameters documented in
html2textrc(5). To find out which and how the formatting parameter defaults are changed, check
the file "pretty.style". If this option is omitted, style compact is assumed as default.

-unparse
This option is for diagnostic purposes: Instead of formatting the parsed document, generate HTML
code, that is guaranteed to be syntactically correct. If html2text has problems parsing a
syntactically incorrect HTML document, this option may help you to understand what html2text
thinks that the original HTML code means.

-version
Print program version and exit.

-width width
By default, html2text formats the HTML documents for a screen width of 79 characters. If
redirecting the output into a file, or if your terminal has a width other than 80 characters, or
if you just want to get an idea how html2text deals with large tables and different terminal
widths, you may want to specify a different width.

FILES

       /etc/html2textrc
              System wide parser configuration file.

       $HOME/.html2textrc
              Personal parser configuration file, overrides the system wide values.

CONFORMING TO

       HTML 3.2 (HTML 3.2 Reference Specification - http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32),

RESTRICTIONS

       Debian version of html2text have no http support. Use html2text through pipes with curl or wget  instead.
       See README.Debian for more information.

       html2text was written to convert HTML 3.2 documents. When using it with HTML 4 or even XHTML 1 documents,
       some constructs present only in these HTML versions might not be rendered.

AUTHOR

       html2text was written up to version 1.2.2  by  Arno  Unkrig  <arno@unkrig.de>  for  GMRS  Software  GmbH,
       Unterschleissheim.

       Current maintainer and primary download location is:
       Martin Bayer <mail@mbayer.de>
       http://www.mbayer.de/html2text/files.shtml

       This man page was modified for Debian by Eugene V. Lyubimkin <jackyf.devel@gmail.com> ⟨⟩