Get plain text content from HTML document?

[Chinh Tran Nam]

Hi All,

I'm looking for sample codes which remove all html tags from a html document and return plain-text content only. That codes should replace <br> or tags with "\n".
Please help.

Thanks in advance.

[Ulf Dittmer]

If you want to control very precisely how the HTML is converted, you could use a library that reads HTML and gives you a DOM tree. NekoHTML and JTidy are two such libraries.
Alternatively, you could use regular expressions to search and replace angle brackets.

[Stan James]

This short article about Visitor Pattern has a reference to the Quiotix HTML parser. The visitor would be a neat way to go through all the nodes in the HTML DOM and write out text or newlines. I just have a bias against the complexity in walking most DOMs.

[Chinh Tran Nam]

Thanks All,

I found this library from SourceForge. It works fairly good; however, there is still a problem parsing duplicate tags (e.g more than one <style> blocks in a html document).

http://htmlparser.sourceforge.net/