How to conver HTML text to plain text?

If I am lucky, I hope to get some real good answers. Basically, I have an HTML file saved on my hard drive, and I want to convert that HTML file to a plain text file.
I tried implementing something myself. My algorithm was to simply match "<" and ">" and get rid of anything in between. It's working fine, but it's not fully cooked. It doesn't get rid of some weird characters like &XXXX, which is supposed to be some sort of a code for HTML. Also, it doesn't remove JavaScript codes or anything that's not contained in <BODY>...</BODY>. I sure can improve my program, but I am also hoping to see a faster and more efficient way to deal with that.
I browsed thru some old topics, but nothing was satisfactory. Someone suggested the use of JEditorPane:
int len = pane.getDocument().getLength();
try {
String text = pane.getDocument().getText(0,len);
System.out.println(text);
} catch (Exception e) {
System.exit(0);
But the problem with that is how a JEditorPane object should be instantiated. I could do something like this JEditorPane pane = new JeditorPane (URL url) or JEditorPane pane = new JeditorPane (String url). Either way, the program takes time to download the HTML page from the corresponding url. If one tries to detect �int len�, one can see that �int len� is likely to be zero, because the HTML page cannot be fully loaded in time. I guess I could try to deal with that problem by creating threads and stuffs. But I hope that there are some better solutions to end this misery once and for all.

Here is a link to an article on the "Swing HTML Parser":
http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc/articles/bookmarks/index.html
This is an example of how you might use the parser callback to solve your problem:
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.Reader;
import javax.swing.text.MutableAttributeSet;
import javax.swing.text.html.HTML;
import javax.swing.text.html.HTMLEditorKit;
import javax.swing.text.html.parser.ParserDelegator;
public class TestParser extends HTMLEditorKit.ParserCallback
     boolean ignoreText;
     public static void main(String[] args)
     throws IOException
          TestParser parser = new TestParser();
          // args[0] is the file to parse
          Reader reader = new FileReader(args[0]);
          try
               new ParserDelegator().parse(reader, parser, false);
          catch (IOException e)
               System.out.println(e);
     public void handleComment(char[] data, int pos)
//          System.out.println(data);
     public void handleEndOfLineString(String eol)
     public void handleEndTag(HTML.Tag tag, int pos)
//          System.out.println("/" + tag);
          if (tag.equals(HTML.Tag.STYLE)
          || tag.equals(HTML.Tag.SCRIPT) )
               ignoreText = false;
     public void handleError(String errorMsg, int pos)
//          System.out.println(pos + ":" + errorMsg);
     public void handleMutableTag(HTML.Tag tag, MutableAttributeSet a, int pos)
//          System.out.println("mutable:" + tag + ": " + pos + ": " + a);
     public void handleSimpleTag(HTML.Tag tag, MutableAttributeSet a, int pos)
//          System.out.println( tag + ":" + a );
     public void handleStartTag(HTML.Tag tag, MutableAttributeSet a, int pos)
//          System.out.println( tag + ":" + a );
          if (tag.equals(HTML.Tag.STYLE)
          || tag.equals(HTML.Tag.SCRIPT) )
               ignoreText = true;
     public void handleText(char[] data, int pos)
          if (! ignoreText)
               System.out.println( data );
}

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Message Edited by HowellBP on 06-16-2009 04:13 PM

1-51626418773
I just got off the phone with Palm Support. Apparently this is a bug in the mail application. It currently does not support parsing both HTML and plain text in the same message. It will read EITHER plain text OR HTML, but not both at the same time. This will be fixed in a future update.

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URLRequest and navigateToURL to open email client but HTML email, not plain text???

I want users to click a button that uses URLRequest and navigateToURL to open the user's default email client with email body pre-populated with HTML email.
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application/xml
application/html
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FTQuest wrote:
@Jason
>The problem there however is that very few people actually set this up... (default mail client)
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Generating html links from plain text

How can I scan a text (a String) and add links when a word is an URL?
I tried the following which works but it's too slow:
String text = rs.getString("text");
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 String word = text2scan;
log.info(word);
if(word.indexOf(".com")!=-1){
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Isn't this already implemented somewhere?
Thanks
Niklas

Because I was semi interested by this issue, and how best to solve it, heres a quick and dirty example program.
It does a very basic job, but should be pretty much equivalent to what you had originally.
package mypackage;
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.BufferedWriter;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.FileWriter;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.PrintWriter;
import java.io.StringReader;
import java.io.StringWriter;
import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;
public class RegexpMakeHyperlinks {
 * Loads a file into a StringBuffer
 * @param f File to read
 * @return StringBuffer with contents of text file.
 * @throws IOException
 public StringBuffer loadFile(File f) throws IOException {
 System.out.println("Reading file " + f.getAbsolutePath());
 BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(f));
 StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
 PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(new BufferedWriter(sw));
 String line = null;
 while ((line = in.readLine()) != null) {
 pw.println(line);
 pw.flush();
 in.close();
 return sw.getBuffer();
 * Writes the contents of a StringBuffer to file
 * @param f File to write to
 * @param sb Text to write to file
 * @throws IOException
 public void writeToFile(File f, StringBuffer sb) throws IOException{
 System.out.println("Outputting to " + f.getAbsolutePath());
 BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new StringReader(sb.toString()));
 PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(f)));
 String line = null;
 while ((line = in.readLine()) != null) {
 out.println(line);
 out.flush();
 in.close();
 * Converts all urls like "www.google.com" into hyperlinks in the text.
 * @param initialText The text to convert
 * @return Converted text.
 public StringBuffer convertText(StringBuffer initialText) {
 StringBuffer result = new StringBuffer(initialText.length());
 Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(href=\")?(http://)?www\\..*?.com\\b");
 Matcher m = p.matcher(initialText);
 while (m.find()) {
 String href = m.group();
 // ignore links that are already hyperlinks
 if (href.startsWith("href")){
 continue;
 // add on the http:// if necessary
 if (!href.startsWith("http://")) {
 href = "http://" + href;
 // add the new text into the output.
 m.appendReplacement(result, "<a href=\"" + href + "\">" + href + "</a>");
 m.appendTail(result);
 return result;
 * Testing method for experimenting with the patternmatching
 * @param text
 public void matchLink(String text) {
 System.out.println("Analyzing text " + text);
 Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(http://)?www\\..*?.com\\b");
 Matcher m = p.matcher(text);
 while (m.find()) {
 System.out.println("Found: " + m.group());
 public static void main(String[] args) {
 RegexpMakeHyperlinks hyper = new RegexpMakeHyperlinks();
 String[] testStrings = { "www.google.com", "www.myspace.net", "make sure you visit www.yahoo.com for details", "Two sites: http://www.java.com and http://www.javabeans.com" };
 for (int i = 0; i < testStrings.length; i++) {
 hyper.matchLink(testStrings);
 System.out.println();
 System.out.println("----------------------------");
System.out.println();
File inFile = new File("makeHyperlinkTest.txt");
File outFile = new File("makeHyperlinkTest.output");
try{
StringBuffer sb = hyper.loadFile(inFile);
StringBuffer result = hyper.convertText(sb);
hyper.writeToFile(outFile, result);
catch(Exception e){
 System.out.println("Error " + e.getMessage());
 e.printStackTrace(System.out);
And a test file makeHyperlinkTest.txt
This file just contains plain text with hyperlinks to places like www.google.com and http://www.yahoo.com.
The program I have written will convert these links like www.google.com into hyperlinks for displaying as html.
Make sure you visit http://www.java.sun.com and read all about Java.
And if I already have an <a href="www.google.com">Hyperlink</a> in this file it should leave it alone right?

Firefox 11 beta is having issues loading Flash and HTML content, shows plain text instead of images

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Hate to see it happening but it looks like Firefox is on its way to being just another Internet Explorer clone (failure). Should have stayed with your original team, all the new folks you have hired are really mucking up the whole project and its goal of a free and open internet. Not to mention writing bad code and costing you money and more importantly the user base.
(Update, now it's not doing it go figure, but I'm sure it will do it again at some point, perhaps its not Firefox and something else, I'll keep my eye on it and try to report any findings)

If you use extensions (Tools > Add-ons > Extension) like Adblock Plus or NoScript or Flash Block that can block content then make sure that such extensions aren't blocking content.
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*Don't make any changes on the Safe mode start window.
*https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Safe+Mode
*https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Troubleshooting+extensions+and+themes

How to remove html-tags from a text.

Hello!
I have a text-field which I will remove html-tag's from.
Example:
"This is a test and another test"
The function must return a similar text, but without the html-
tags and (in this case).
Anybody that can help me with this little problem?
Thanks in advance for any help :-)
Best regards
Kjetil Klxve

You can wait for some kind personal to post a complete code
solution... But if you want to fix this yourself (which is good
for the soul) here are some hints:
- You can use SUBSTR to get at chunks of text
- You can use INSTR to find particular characters.
- You can use INSTR as an argument of SUBSTR
Hence:
bit_of_text := SUBSTR(text, 1, INSTR(text, '<'));
chopped_text := SUBSTR(text, INSTR(text, '<'));
bit_of_text := bit_of_text||SUBSTR(chopped_text, INSTR
(text, '>'), INSTR(text, '<'));
will give you the first bit of text that doesn't contain any
angle brackets.
From this you should be able to work out how to functionalised
this (you'll need to store the offsets and use them in a loop
construct).
Note that this assumes that the text only contains the '<'
character when it's part of a HTML tag. If you can't guarantee
this then you'll have to explicitly search for all the tags e.g.
bit_of_text := SUBSTR(text, 1, INSTR(lower(text), ''));
bit_of_text := SUBSTR(text, 1, INSTR(lower(text), ' '));
This will be a bit of pain. And completely rules out XML!
rgds APC

Regular Expressions for converting HTML to Structured Plain Text

I'm writing a PL/SQL function that will convert HTML to plain text, but still preserve some of the formatting/line breaks. One of my challenges is in writing a regular expression to capture the text blocks while ignoring the markup. I'm trying to write an expression that will grab all of the text between start/end tags, but discard the tags. For example, to find all of the text between a start/end paragraph, I want to do something like:
REGEXP_REPLACE('This is the body of the paragraph', '<p.*>(.*)', '\1||v_crlf' )
where \1 returns the contents of the paragraph and v_crlf (declared earlier in the function) inserts a line break. I know there are more general expressions that will remove all tags, but I want to specifically identify the tags so I can process them appropriately. This way I can easily convert HTML to plain text for email and reporting without having to keep two versions around. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Once I get this worked out, I will repost with the function code for others to use. Thanks.
Edited by: jritschel on Oct 26, 2010 9:58 AM

Here's a function I wrote for an app. I'm not making in promises on it's accuracy as the app was just a proof of concept and never made it to production.
function strip_html( p_clob in clob )
return clob
is
 l_out clob;
 l_test number := 0;
 l_max_loops constant number := 20;
 i pls_integer := 0;
begin
 l_out := regexp_replace(p_clob,' | ',chr(13)||chr(10),1,0,'imn');
 l_out := regexp_replace(l_out,'',chr(13)||chr(10),1,0,'imn');
 l_out := replace(l_out,'<li>',chr(13)||chr(10)||'*<li>');
 l_out := regexp_replace(l_out,'(.+?)','*\1*',1,0,'imn');
 l_out := regexp_replace(l_out,'(.+?)','_\1_',1,0,'imn');
 loop
 l_test := regexp_instr(l_out,'<([A-Z][A-Z0-9]*)[^>]*>.*?</\1>',1,1,0,'imn');
 exit when l_test = 0 or i > l_max_loops;
 l_out := regexp_replace(l_out,'<([A-Z][A-Z0-9]*)[^>]*>(.*?)</\1>','\2',1,0,'imn');
 i := i + 1;
 end loop;
 return l_out;
end strip_html;{code}
The loop is there to handle nested HTML.
Tyler Muth
http://tylermuth.wordpress.com
"Applied Oracle Security: Developing Secure Database and Middleware Environments": http://sn.im/aos.book
Edited by: Tyler on Oct 26, 2010 10:03 AM

How do you a file to plain text?

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Rich text versus plain text when sending to Outlook

I've notice some strange behavior with Mail today. I've been sending some attachments to people who use Outlook on an Exchange server. When I send the mail in Rich Text Format, they receive the mail but the text and the signature are included as attachments as well. This is not the case if I send the same message with no attachment. Also, if I change the message format to Plain Text, the mail appears normal both with and without the attachment.
Does anyone have a similar issue? Are there any know solutions? I'd really prefer to use RTF vs. Plain Text.
Cheers,
Barry
Message was edited by: BAField

Read the attached link and the link to the microsoft site to better understand what may be happening.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304245
If the attachment is plain text it should not be sent as a windows friendly attachment.
If the attachment is recognized as having rich text content it should be sent a as a windows friendly attachment.
The linked Microsoft document in the attached link has a Common Scenarios section which shows the Solution settings for Outlook based on the Problem experienced by the recipient.

How do I set up a plain, text only document?

I've been using TextEdit for all my word processing for the past several years. Now, I'd like to use iWork 09
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No text boxes to monkey with or try to get rid of. I can set margins anywhere I want-- no hassle.
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I suppose I could just keep using TexEdit but I've had this program for a couple yrs. and up until today have
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Word processing, especially simple word processing, on the other hand, I expected to be a snap and it
has me very frustrated! Go figure!
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have to mess with anything everytime I want this type of page?
Thank you.

Simple, keep using TextEdit.
Pages is not a text editor which is what you are asking for. It is a Word Processor/DTP/Spreadsheet/Graphing application.
Don't undersatnd why you are rushing to put all your eggs into one proprietry, single platform, unique format that Apple will ultimately abandon.
If you want more than you are getting from TextEdit, try iText Express (free).
Peter

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How to set html bullet effect for text in text area

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Hi ADF Experts,
I have a requirement like ,one of my function is generating this below html,
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Thanks Puthanampatti,
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