You can always use your browser of choice -- they have a 'Save As' and you can choose 'As Text'. Something tells me this is not sufficient enough for you, however. The Perl Cookbook has a recipe devoted to converting HTML to ASCII. This is straight from the first edition, Recipe 20.5:

use HTML::FormatText;
use HTML::Parse;

$html = parse_htmlfile($filename);
$formatter = HTML::FormatText->new(leftmargin => 0, rightmargin => 50)
+;
$ascii = $formatter->format($html);
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L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

I have problems understanding your question, but at least one of the following modules should help you.

Any of LWP::Simple, LWP::UserAgent and WWW::Mechanize will help you download a web page.

As for converting the HTML to text, HTML::FormatText and possibly HTML::FormatText::WithLinks should be of interest.

Update: I see others have already posted answers. InfiniteSilence posted an example of downloading a web page and saving it as HTML in a file with the extention .txt. jeffa posted an example of converting HTML to text. Pick and choose what you want.

% lynx -dump www.google.com > google.txt
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perl -e "use LWP::Simple; getprint('http://myfoo.com')" >> myfile.txt
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This would be nicer, IMHO:

perl -MLWP::Simple -e"getstore('http://myfoo.com', 'myfile.txt')"
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Not sure what the tassex really wants though. Do you (tassex) want to store the HTML in a .txt file (like above), or do you want to strip the HTML and save the text?

--
b10m

All code is usually tested, but rarely trusted.

use LWP::Simple;
use HTML::TreeBuilder;
use IO::File;

IO::File
->new( "> $file" )
->print(
  HTML::TreeBuilder
  ->new_from_content( get $url )
  ->as_text
)
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Create a new printer but choose a plain text printer, and add the option to save it as a file instead of printing it. Then, when you choose /Print at any app. you are going to be prompted for the name and location of your text file. And that's it! It would write it as if you had an old plain text matrix printer (without any graphics)...

But it is better to have Firefox and it's incredible extensions (Copy to...).

lwp-request -m get -o text http://myfoo.com  >myfile.txt
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