Question

Is there anything out there to convert html to plain text (maybe a nokogiri script)? Something that would keep the line breaks, but that’s about it.

If I write something on googledocs, like this, and run that command, it outputs (removing the css and javascript), this:

\n\n\n\n\nh1. Test h2. HELLO THEREI am some teexton the next line!!!OKAY!#*!)$!

So the formatting’s all messed up. I’m sure someone has solved the details like these somewhere out there.

Answer 1

Actually, this is much simpler:

require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'

puts Nokogiri::HTML(my_html).text

You still have line break issues, though, so you’re going to have to figure out how you want to handle those yourself.