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html2text(1) General Commands Manual html2text(1)
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 sub-
stitutes 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 in-
put, 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 for-
matting properties), then "reasonable" defaults are assumed. The RC file format is de-
scribed 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 recod-
ing. This option cancels this behavior.
-ascii By default, when -nometa is supplied, html2text uses UTF-8 for the output. Specify-
ing 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 op-
tion 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 er-
rors 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 docu-
ment. This option is for diagnostic purposes.
-help Print command line summary and exit.
-nobs By default, original html2text renders underlined letters with sequences like "un-
derscore-backspace-character" and boldface letters like "character-backspace-char-
acter". 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 out-
put-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 docu-
mented in html2textrc(5). To find out which and how the formatting parameter de-
faults 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 charac-
ters. 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 ren-
dered.
AUTHOR
html2text was written up to version 1.2.2 by Arno Unkrig <arno AT unkrig.de> for GMRS Soft-
ware GmbH, Unterschleissheim.
Current maintainer and primary download location is:
Martin Bayer <mail AT mbayer.de>
http://www.mbayer.de/html2text/files.shtml
This man page was modified for Debian by Eugene V. Lyubimkin <jackyf.devel AT gmail.com> <>
SEE ALSO
html2textrc(5), less(1), more(1)
2008-09-20 html2text(1)
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On Apache
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