Re: Using HTML::Parser for simple tag removal

Is this an attempt at HTML to text conversion? If so, this is what I was working on yesterday. Here's my code for solving that:

use HTML::TreeBuilder;
use HTML::FormatText;
use Encode;
sub HTML_to_text {
    my $content = shift;
    my $html = HTML::TreeBuilder->new;
    $content = '<body>' . $content . '</body>'
        unless $content =~ m/<body[^>]*>/i;
    $html->parse( decode("utf8", $content) ); # this is necessary othe
+rwise UTF8 chars get hamburgered,
    my $formatter = HTML::FormatText->new;
    my $out =  _trim($formatter->format($html)); # trim is a selective
+ trimmer that preserves some kinds of whitespace, delete this if you 
+don't need it.
    return $out;
}
[download]

(The ridiculous number of lines and named variables are due to a step-by-step debugging inspection where I was trying to solve the utf8 problem -- essentially, make sure you have the latest HTML::Parser installed if you anticipate utf8 characters, and you may need to have them "marked" as such by going through the decode() function.)

If you only need to remove *some* tags, try HTML::TagFilter.

Comment on Re: Using HTML::Parser for simple tag removal Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
HTML::FromText by marnanel (Beadle) on May 26, 2005 at 20:57 UTC
HTML::FromText is pretty good if you want to turn a chunk of HTML into formatted text (rather than just stripping out the tags). It does lists and so on as well.	[reply]