Cool Python Module: html2text
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Join For FreeParts of the Fiesta API (as well as some new features we’re rolling out for Fiesta itself) rely on the ability to automatically generate clean text (markdown) versions of incoming messages. Our parser tends to prefer using the text version of a message if possible, as it’s generally easier to parse than the HTML version. That said, sometimes a message only contains an HTML version - we need a way to generate our canonical markdown representation from that alone. Enter html2text.
html2text is a great little Python module by Aaron Swartz that takes HTML as input and generates a markdown version as output. Here’s an example:
>>> import html2text >>> print html2text.html2text('''<html><body><p>Hello World</p> <ul><li>Here's one thing</li> <li>And here's another!</li></ul></body></html>''') Hello World * Here's one thing * And here's another!
The output is nicely formatted markdown text, exactly what we were looking for. The only problem we’ve noticed is that the module has some trouble dealing with malformed HTML. Our approach has been to run things through BeautifulSoup first, which tends to do a great job even with crappy markup.
Source: http://blog.fiesta.cc/post/14575090271/cool-python-module-html2text
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