RDTextract

HTML→Markdown extractor built for AI / LLM training corpora — every byte should carry signal, not boilerplate.

Language scope: core extraction is language-agnostic and works on any language. The is_low_value_stub() heuristic (paywall / login / skip-link detection) supports French, English, Spanish, German, Italian out of the box. The library was originally built for a French corpus, so FR is the most battle-tested.

• Zero noise artifacts — no double-bullets, no orphan punctuation, no link dumps, no widget repetition (validated on 672 real .fr pages).
• Smart fallback chain — JSON-LD structured data (Recipe, Article, FAQ, HowTo, Product) → <title> + meta description, for SPA / React / Next.js pages with empty bodies.
• Robust against malformed HTML — auto-detects and recovers from unclosed tags, gzip leaks, and CMS quirks (Drupal, WordPress Elementor, React 18 SSR Suspense, etc.).
• Multi-language stub detection — paywall / login / skip-link markers in FR / EN / ES / DE / IT.
• is_low_value_stub() filter for paywalls, login walls, skip-link stubs, empty pages.
• One required dependency: beautifulsoup4. Optional [fast] extra adds lxml for 2-3× speed.

What's new in v0.3.0

Large output-quality release, every change validated on a 205k-page French crawl (10k+ random pages per audit, false-positives verified line-by-line):

• Recovered lost content — the over-broad overlay junk pattern was silently destroying whole articles on ~3% of pages that use it (news/heritage/HR content, up to +90k chars/page). Validated: 105 pages recovered on 12k, zero regressions.
• Cleaner Markdown structure — a heading nested in a list item now renders as bold (- **Title**) instead of invalid - ### Title (2155→~0 occurrences); a single-column layout table collapses to paragraphs instead of an empty-header 1-wide table.
• Un-glued dates — 18avr.2024 → 18 avr. 2024 (day/month/year split across styled <span>s), anchored on FR months so non-dates are untouched.
• More UI noise removed — invisible/zero-width characters (ZWSP, BOM, soft hyphen; NBSP→space), standalone action labels (Haut de page, Partager, Imprimer), breadcrumb trails (Accueil / X / Y), broadened skip-link variants, generic read-more CTAs (En savoir plus, Lire la suite), repeated per-item CTAs, and consecutive duplicate captions.
• Cookie-banner stubs flagged by is_low_value_stub.
• Held the line on false positives — attempted mega-menu (ALL-CAPS), form-wrapped, display:none and lone-digit strips were backed out after large audits showed them eating real content (team rosters, directories, dates).

Test suite 26 → 48. 100% backward-compatible API.

What's new in v0.2.1

Bug-fix + quality release. v0.2.0 fails to import on Python 3.9 (a str | None annotation evaluated at import time) — v0.2.1 restores the advertised 3.9 support.

• Python 3.9 import fixed — from __future__ import annotations added; the CI matrix now covers 3.9 → 3.12 so this can't regress.
• Fail-closed conversion — on any internal error the converter/cleaner now return "" instead of leaking raw HTML into the corpus.
• Recursion guard — pathological nesting (thousands of unclosed tags) is flattened past a depth cap instead of aborting the whole page.
• Skip-link stripping — accessibility skip-links ("Aller au contenu", "Skip to content", concatenated skip-nav bars) are removed from the output. They opened 20 % of pages in the 672-page benchmark; now 0 %, with zero false positives on that corpus.
• Space-before-punctuation fix — the <a>-renderer no longer leaves "lien ."; 1 805 → 41 occurrences across the benchmark, while .com/.fr extensions, decimals, and French typography (space before ; : ! ?) are preserved.
• Single-sourced version + is_low_value_stub(None) no longer raises.

What's new in v0.2.0

Major release with substantial gains across every metric measured on the Tranco top-1000 .fr benchmark (672 pages):

Metric	v0.1.x	v0.2.0	Δ
Quality (corrected)	98.3	99.3	+1.0
Avg markdown size	5 538c	6 875c	+24%
Speed (with lxml)	152ms	107ms	-30%
Empty pages	39	21	-46%
Recoverable empty pages	14	0	-100%
Total artifacts	9	0	-100%

New features:

• [fast] extra — opt-in lxml backend for 2-3× faster parsing, with automatic fallback to html.parser on malformed HTML.
• JSON-LD fallback — Schema.org structured data (Article, NewsArticle, BlogPosting, Recipe, FAQPage, HowTo, Product, with @graph wrapper) extracted when the body is empty.
• Multi-language stub detection — is_low_value_stub(md, language="en") supports fr, en, es, de, it (paywall, login, skip-link markers).
• PARSER constant — module-level value exposing the active parser ('lxml' or 'html.parser').

Robustness fixes (no regression, all gains):

• React 18 SSR Suspense boundaries (<div hidden> with content) preserved.
• WordPress Elementor pages no longer destroyed by widget pattern over-match.
• Drupal pages with malformed <header> wrappers now extract the real content.
• Layout-tables (image + caption WordPress) collapsed cleanly to paragraphs.
• Gzipped HTML leaks (corrupted fetcher) detected → empty output instead of mojibake.

Tooling:

• New benchmark/find_outliers.py — classifies suspicious extractions (EMPTY_LARGE / TINY_RATIO / HUGE_RATIO / ARTIFACTS / SPA_NO_FALLBACK) for human review.
• New benchmark/compare_outputs.py — generates side-by-side .md outputs of the 4 extractors for any sample of pages.
• Test suite expanded from 6 → 48 tests (JSON-LD types, multi-lang, layout-tables, parser detection, robustness, skip-link/punctuation/overlay/date/heading/table regressions).

API compatibility: 100% backward-compatible with v0.1.x. Existing code keeps working; new features are opt-in.

Install

pip install RDTextract           # minimal install (html.parser only)
pip install RDTextract[fast]     # recommended: adds lxml for faster parsing

Quick start

import rdtextract

html = open("page.html", encoding="utf-8", errors="replace").read()

# One-shot
markdown = rdtextract.extract(html)

# Or two-step (re-use cleaned HTML for caching, debugging, etc.)
cleaned = rdtextract.clean_html(html)
markdown = rdtextract.to_markdown(cleaned)

# Filter low-value pages before writing to your corpus
if not rdtextract.is_low_value_stub(markdown):
    with open("page.md", "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
        f.write(markdown)
    print(f"Saved {len(markdown)} chars to page.md")
else:
    print("Page is low-value (paywall/login/empty), skipped.")

# Multi-language: target one specific language for stub detection
if not rdtextract.is_low_value_stub(markdown, language="en"):
    save(markdown)

Note : PyPI distribution is RDTextract, Python module is rdtextract (PEP 8 lowercase).

Why another HTML→Markdown lib?

Existing tools target human readability (newsletters, archive). RDTextract targets LLM training data: every byte should carry signal.

Benchmark on Tranco top-1000 .fr homepages (672 pages successfully fetched and processed), measured against a corpus quality scorer (lower artifact counts = cleaner output):

Extractor	Quality (corrected)	double-bullet	orphan punct	http dump	para dup	Total artifacts
RDTextract	99.3	0	0	0	0	0
html2text	96.2	1	148	70	2 373	2 592
trafilatura	96.1	18	780	10	309	1 117
markdownify	85.5	0	246	107	5 042	5 395

RDTextract wins on quality AND on all 4 artifact metrics — zero artifacts on every counter. Reproducible: see benchmark/ — domain list is committed (Tranco, deterministic), HTML cache is .gitignored.

Validated by human review

On 4 randomly-sampled pages (Université Paris Cité, Sport 2000, Élysée.fr, Polytechnique), reading the markdown outputs side-by-side confirms:

• trafilatura misses entire structured sections (cards, lists) and duplicates paragraphs ("Découvrir le campus" ×2, legal disclaimers ×6)
• html2text captures everything but the first 1000-2000 chars are systematically the navigation mega-menu
• markdownify dumps everything raw (often >100 KB per page, unusable for LLM training)
• RDTextract captures the structured cards trafilatura misses, drops the menu nav html2text keeps, and dedupes what trafilatura repeats

Use python benchmark/compare_outputs.py to generate side-by-side comparisons on your own pages.

Performance

Measured on the full 672-page benchmark (single pass; figures are machine-dependent):

• ~115 ms/page with the [fast] extra (lxml backend)
• ~135 ms/page without lxml (pure-Python html.parser) — only ~1.2× slower, because most of the time is the Markdown walker, not the parser
• Roughly 3× slower than html2text (~40 ms/page): we filter + walk + dedup far more aggressively, but produce zero artifacts vs html2text's 2 592.

API

extract(html: str) -> str

Convenience: to_markdown(clean_html(html)). The main entry point.

clean_html(html: str) -> str

Strip nav/footer/scripts/ads/hidden elements. Drops responsive duplicates (mobile/desktop variants), icon font ligatures, role-based junk (role=navigation, role=banner, …). Preserves <script type="application/ld+json"> for structured data fallback.

Smart guards built in:

• Auto-falls back from lxml to html.parser when malformed HTML over-nests content into a single <header>/<nav>.
• Size-guard preserves large <header>/<nav>/<div> elements that match junk patterns but contain real content (e.g. WordPress with-nav modifier, Drupal region-header wrappers, React 18 <div hidden> Suspense boundaries).

to_markdown(cleaned_html: str) -> str

Walk the cleaned tree and emit Markdown. Includes:

• Heading levels, lists (with sublist flattening), tables (colspan, nested, layout-table fix), code blocks, blockquotes, definition lists.
• Post-processing: collapse whitespace, restore breadcrumb separators, dedup consecutive blocks, dedup global blocks (UI widgets repeated ≥3×), strip standalone URL lines, strip orphan punctuation.
• Fallback chain for empty body:
  1. JSON-LD structured data (Article, NewsArticle, BlogPosting, Recipe, FAQPage, HowTo, Product, with @graph wrapper support)
  2. Meta fallback (<title> + meta description, with smart length thresholds)

is_low_value_stub(markdown: str, language: str | None = None) -> bool

True if the markdown is a paywall, login stub, skip-link, or empty page (no LLM training value). Combined length + marker check (avoids false positives on real articles that happen to mention subscription words in passing).

Supported languages for marker detection: fr, en, es, de, it. Pass language=None (default) to check all supported languages.

rdtextract.is_low_value_stub(md)                    # check all languages
rdtextract.is_low_value_stub(md, language="en")     # only EN markers

PARSER

Module-level constant exposing the parser actually in use: 'lxml' if installed, otherwise 'html.parser'.

import rdtextract
print(rdtextract.PARSER)   # → 'lxml' or 'html.parser'

Architecture

Two stages, ~700 lines of pure Python total:

HTML raw
   ↓
HTMLCleaner.clean_html()   ── strip 90% of DOM (nav, footer, ads, scripts, hidden)
   ↓
Cleaned HTML
   ↓
MarkdownConverter.to_markdown()   ── custom walker emitting clean Markdown
   ↓
Markdown
   ↓
[optional] is_low_value_stub()   ── filter paywalls / login / empty
   ↓
LLM training corpus

Custom walker (no markdownify dependency) avoids ~50% of buggy edge cases that wrap-libraries inherit.

Testing & benchmarking

pip install -e ".[dev,benchmark]"
pytest -q                          # 48 tests
python benchmark/fetch.py --top 1000   # download HTML cache
python benchmark/run.py            # 4-extractor comparison
python benchmark/find_outliers.py  # find pages where extraction is suspect
python benchmark/compare_outputs.py --samples 10   # side-by-side review

The benchmark/ directory is reproducible: the Tranco domain list is committed, the HTML cache is .gitignored (re-fetched on first run, ~30 min for top-1000).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Author

Théo CHARLET — extracted from the RDTvlokip Search crawler stack.