An HTML Stripper is a tool used to remove all HTML tags from an HTML document or string, leaving only the plain text content. This can be useful for extracting readable text from an HTML page without any formatting, styles, or embedded elements such as images, links, or scripts.
Why Use an HTML Stripper?
Extract Plain Text: If you want to convert a web page or HTML content into plain, readable text, an HTML stripper removes all the tags and formatting.
Simplify Content: If you only need the text from an HTML document without any images, videos, links, or other elements, the HTML stripper will clean it up.
Remove Unnecessary Markup: Sometimes HTML content may contain unnecessary or broken tags that you don't need. A stripper helps clean that up.
Data Extraction: When you want to extract specific text from HTML (e.g., from a webpage), stripping out all non-text elements makes the extraction process simpler.
Key Features of an HTML Stripper:
Removes HTML Tags: It removes all tags, including <div>, <span>, <a>, and so on, leaving only text.
Preserves Plain Text: It retains all text content between the tags without modifying the structure of paragraphs, line breaks, or spaces.
No Formatting or Styles: It strips out CSS classes, inline styles, and any other attributes attached to the HTML elements.
Option for Newline or Space Preservation: Some tools allow you to configure whether you want to preserve line breaks or newlines (for readability).
Why You Might Need an HTML Stripper:
Web Scraping: When extracting data from websites for analysis, you may want to remove all the HTML formatting and just work with the text.
Content Cleanup: If you're copying content from a web page into a document and want to remove the styling and links, an HTML stripper can clean up the text.
Text Processing: If you need to process or analyze raw text without any HTML, an HTML stripper is an effective solution.
Example of HTML Content (Before Stripping):
html
<html>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to My Website</h1>
<p>This is a <a href="https://example.com">link</a> to my website.</p>
<p>Here is a list:</p>
<ul>
<li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li>
<li>Item 3</li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>
Example of Result (After Stripping HTML):
css
Welcome to My Website
This is a link to my website.
Here is a list:
Item 1
Item 2
Item 3
As you can see, after using the HTML stripper, all HTML tags have been removed, and only the raw text remains, including text from the <h1>, <p>, <a>, and <ul> elements.
Common HTML Stripper Features:
Removes Specific Tags: Some tools allow you to specify which tags to remove or leave behind, such as removing only <script> tags or specific div classes.
Customizable Output: Some HTML stripper tools let you choose whether to preserve spaces, line breaks, or remove them entirely.
Escape Special Characters: An HTML stripper will often escape special characters like & to their proper HTML entity forms (&, etc.).
Use Cases:
Web Scraping: When extracting data from a web page, you can use an HTML stripper to get just the plain text for further processing.
Cleaning Text Content: If you copy-paste content from websites, an HTML stripper removes all formatting, links, and embedded elements.
Data Conversion: Converting HTML to plain text format for easier processing or storing in databases.