html2text 2016.1.8

Turn HTML into equivalent Markdown-structured text.

# html2text

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[](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/html2text/)
[](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/html2text/)
[](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/html2text/)
[](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/html2text/)
[](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/html2text/)
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html2text is a Python script that converts a page of HTML into clean, easy-to-read plain ASCII text. Better yet, that ASCII also happens to be valid Markdown (a text-to-HTML format).


Usage: `html2text [(filename|url) [encoding]]`

| Option | Description
|--------------------------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------------
| `--version` | Show program's version number and exit
| `-h`, `--help` | Show this help message and exit
| `--ignore-links` | Don't include any formatting for links
|`--escape-all` | Escape all special characters. Output is less readable, but avoids corner case formatting issues.
| `--reference-links` | Use reference links instead of links to create markdown
| `--mark-code` | Mark preformatted and code blocks with [code]...[/code]

For a complete list of options see the [docs](docs/usage.md)


Or you can use it from within `Python`:

```
>>> import html2text
>>>
>>> print(html2text.html2text("<p><strong>Zed's</strong> dead baby, <em>Zed's</em> dead.</p>"))
**Zed's** dead baby, _Zed's_ dead.

```


Or with some configuration options:
```
>>> import html2text
>>>
>>> h = html2text.HTML2Text()
>>> # Ignore converting links from HTML
>>> h.ignore_links = True
>>> print h.handle("<p>Hello, <a href='http://earth.google.com/'>world</a>!")
Hello, world!

>>> print(h.handle("<p>Hello, <a href='http://earth.google.com/'>world</a>!"))

Hello, world!

>>> # Don't Ignore links anymore, I like links
>>> h.ignore_links = False
>>> print(h.handle("<p>Hello, <a href='http://earth.google.com/'>world</a>!"))
Hello, [world](http://earth.google.com/)!

```

*Originally written by Aaron Swartz. This code is distributed under the GPLv3.*


## How to install

`html2text` is available on pypi
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/html2text

```
$ pip install html2text
```


## How to run unit tests

PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:. coverage run --source=html2text setup.py test -v

To see the coverage results:

coverage combine
coverage html

then open the `./htmlcov/index.html` file in your browser.

## Documentation

Documentation lives [here](docs/index.md)