Converting HTML to plain text in PHP for e-mail

Question

I use TinyMCE to allow minimal formatting of text within my site  From the HTML that s produced  I d like to convert it to plain text for e-mail  I ve been using a class called html2text  but it s really lacking in UTF-8 support  among other things  I do  however  like that it maps certain HTML tags to plain text formatting     like putting underscores around text that previously had  lt i gt  tags in the HTML   Does anyone use a similar approach to converting HTML to plain text in PHP  And if so  Do you recommend any third-party classes that I can use  Or how do you best tackle this issue

User · Answer

If you want to convert the HTML special characters and not just remove them as well as strip things down and prepare for plain text this was the solution that worked for me     function htmlToPlainText  str        str   str replace   amp nbsp          str        str   html entity decode  str  ENT QUOTES   ENT COMPAT    UTF-8         str   html entity decode  str  ENT HTML5   UTF-8         str   html entity decode  str        str   htmlspecialchars decode  str        str   strip tags  str        return  str      string     lt p gt this is   amp nbsp   a test lt  p gt   lt div gt Yes this is   amp amp  does it get  processed    lt  div gt    htmlToPlainText  string       this is     a test  Yes this is   amp  does it get processed      html entity decode w  ENT QUOTES   ENT XML1 converts things like  amp  39  htmlspecialchars decode converts things like  amp amp   html entity decode converts things like   amp lt  and strip tags removes any HTML tags left over

User · Answer

public function plainText  text         text   strip tags  text    lt br gt  lt p gt  lt li gt          text   preg replace     lt    gt    gt     PHP EOL   text        return  text       text    string 1 lt br gt string 2 lt br  gt  lt ul gt  lt li gt string 3 lt  li gt  lt li gt string 4 lt  li gt  lt  ul gt  lt p gt string 5 lt  p gt     echo planText  text    output string 1 string 2 string 3 string 4 string 5

User · Answer

For texts in utf-8  it worked for me mb convert encoding  To process everything regardless of errors  make sure you use the       The basic code I use is    dom   new DOMDocument      dom- gt loadHTML mb convert encoding  html   HTML-ENTITIES    UTF-8       body    dom- gt getElementsByTagName  body  - gt item 0   echo  body- gt textContent    If you want something more advanced  you can iteratively analyze the nodes  but you will encounter many problems with whitespaces   I have implemented a converter based on what I say here  If you are interested  you can download it from git https   github com kranemora html2text   It may serve as a reference to make yours  You can use it like this    html    lt  lt  lt EOF  lt p gt Welcome to  lt strong gt html2text lt strong gt  lt  p gt   lt p gt It s  lt em gt works lt  em gt  for you  lt  p gt  EOF    html2Text   new  kranemora Html2Text Html2Text   text    html2Text- gt convert  html

User · Answer

I didn t find any of the existing solutions fitting - simple HTML emails to simple plain text files   I ve opened up this repository  hope it helps someone  MIT license  by the way     https   github com RobQuistNL SimpleHtmlToText  Example    myHtml     lt b gt This is HTML lt  b gt  lt h1 gt Header lt  h1 gt  lt br  gt  lt br  gt Newlines   echo  new Parser   - gt parseString  myHtml     returns     This is HTML       Header       Newlines

User · Answer

here is another solution   cleaner input   strip tags  text    For other variations of sanitization functions  see  https   github com ttodua useful-php-scripts blob master filter-php-variable-sanitize php

User · Answer

If you don t want to strip the tags completely and keep the content inside the tags  you can use the DOMDocument and extract the textContent of the root node like this   function html2text  html         dom   new DOMDocument         dom- gt loadHTML   lt body gt     strip tags  html    lt b gt  lt a gt  lt i gt  lt div gt  lt span gt  lt p gt        lt  body gt          xpath   new DOMXPath  dom        node    xpath- gt query  body  - gt item 0       return  node- gt textContent     text     p    this is  lt b gt test lt  b gt    lt p gt how are  lt i gt you  lt  i gt    lt a href     gt I  m fine  lt  a gt  lt  p gt    print html2text  p      this is test  how are you   I m fine    One advantage of this approach is that it does not require any external packages

User · Answer

Markdownify converts HTML to Markdown  a plain-text formatting system used on this very site

User · Answer

I have just found a PHP function  strip tags    and its working in my case   I tried to convert the following HTML     lt p gt  lt span style  font-family   Verdana   sans-serif   color  black  font-size  7 5pt   gt  amp nbsp  lt  span gt Many  practitioners are optimistic that the eyeglass and contact lens  industry will recover from the recent economic storm  Did your practice  feel its affects  amp nbsp  Statistics show revenue notably declined in 2008 and  2009  But interestingly enough  those that monitor these trends state  that despite the industry s lackluster performance during this time   revenue has grown at an average annual rate amp nbsp of 2 2  over the last five  years  to  9 0 billion in 2010  amp nbsp  So despite the downturn  how were we  able to manage growth as an industry  lt  p gt    After applying strip tags   function  I have got the following output     amp amp nbsp Many  practitioners are optimistic that the eyeglass and contact lens  industry will recover from the recent economic storm  Did your practice  feel its affects  amp amp nbsp  Statistics show revenue notably declined in 2008 and  2009  But interestingly enough  those that monitor these trends state  that despite the industry amp  039 s lackluster performance during this time   revenue has grown at an average annual rate amp amp nbsp of 2 2  over the last five  years  to  9 0 billion in 2010  amp amp nbsp  So despite the downturn  how were we  able to manage growth as an industry

User · Answer

I came around the same problem as the OP  and trying some solutions from the top answers above didn t prove to work for my scenarios  See why at the end   Instead  I found this helpful script  to avoid confusion let s call it html2text roundcube  available under GPL    https   github com mtibben html2text   It s actually an updated version of an already mentioned script - http   www chuggnutt com html2text php - updated by RoundCube mail   Usage    h2t   new  Html2Text Html2Text  Hello   amp quot  lt b gt world lt  b gt  amp quot     echo  h2t- gt getText       prints Hello   WORLD    Why html2text roundcube proved better than the others    Script http   www chuggnutt com html2text php didn t work out of the box for cases with special HTML codes names  eg  amp auml    or unpaired quotes  eg  lt p gt 25  Monitor lt  p gt    Script https   github com soundasleep html2text had no option to hide or group the links at the end of the text  making a usual HTML page look bloated with links when in text-plain format  customizing the code for special treatment of how the transformation is done is not as straight forward as simply editing an array in html2text roundcube

User · Answer

Use html2text  example HTML to text   licensed under the Eclipse Public License  It uses PHP s DOM methods to load from HTML  and then iterates over the resulting DOM to extract plain text  Usage      when installed using the Composer package  text   Html2Text Html2Text  convert  html       usage when installed using html2text php require  html2text php     text   convert html to text  html     Although incomplete  it is open source and contributions are welcome   Issues with other conversion scripts    Since html2text  GPL  is not EPL-compatible  lkessler s link  attribution  is incompatible with most open source licenses

User · Answer

Converting from HTML to text using a DOMDocument is a viable solution  Consider HTML2Text  which requires PHP5    http   www howtocreate co uk php html2texthowto html http   www howtocreate co uk php  http   www howtocreate co uk jslibs termsOfUse html   Regarding UTF-8  the write-up on the  howto  page states      PHP s own support for unicode is quite poor  and it does not always handle utf-8 correctly  Although the html2text script uses unicode-safe methods  without needing the mbstring module   it cannot always cope with PHP s own handling of encodings  PHP does not really understand unicode or encodings like utf-8  and uses the base encoding of the system  which tends to be one of the ISO-8859 family  As a result  what may look to you like a valid character in your text editor  in either utf-8 or single-byte  may well be misinterpreted by PHP  So even though you think you are feeding a valid character into html2text  you may well not be    The author provides several approaches to solving this and states that version 2 of HTML2Text  using DOMDocument  has UTF-8 support   Note the restrictions for commercial use

User · Answer

There s the trusty strip tags function  It s not pretty though  It ll only sanitize  You could combine it with a string replace to get your fancy underscores     lt  php    to strip all tags and wrap italics with underscore strip tags str replace array   lt i      lt  i     array             text        to preserve anchors    str replace   a     lt a   strip tags str replace   lt a     a    text

User · Answer

You can test this function  function html2text  Document         Rules   array     lt script   gt     gt     lt  script gt  si                          lt            lt  gt     gt  si                            r n    s                             amp  quot  34   i                          amp  amp  38   i                          amp  lt  60   i                          amp  gt  62   i                          amp  nbsp  160   i                          amp  iexcl  161   i                          amp  cent  162   i                          amp  pound  163   i                          amp  copy  169   i                          amp  reg  174   i                          amp   d    e                       Replace   array                                                                                                            amp                            lt                            gt                                                     chr 161                         chr 162                         chr 163                         chr 169                         chr 174                          chr                         return preg replace  Rules   Replace   Document

User · Answer

You can use lynx with -stdin and -dump options to achieve that    lt  php  descriptorspec   array     0   gt  array  pipe    r        stdin is a pipe that the child will read from    1   gt  array  pipe    w        stdout is a pipe that the child will write to    2   gt  array  file     tmp htmp2txt log    a      stderr is a file to write to      process   proc open  lynx -stdin -dump 2 gt  amp 1    descriptorspec   pipes    tmp   NULL    if  is resource  process             pipes now looks like this         0   gt  writeable handle connected to child stdin        1   gt  readable handle connected to child stdout        Any error output will be appended to htmp2txt log       stdin    pipes 0       fwrite  stdin    lt  lt  lt  EOT   lt html xmlns  http   www w3 org 1999 xhtml  xml lang  en  lang  en  gt   lt head gt    lt title gt TEST lt  title gt   lt  head gt   lt body gt   lt h1 gt  lt span gt Lorem Ipsum lt  span gt  lt  h1 gt    lt h4 gt  Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet  consectetur  adipisci velit     lt  h4 gt   lt h5 gt  There is no one who loves pain itself  who seeks after it and wants to have it  simply because it is pain     lt  h5 gt   lt p gt  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet  consectetur adipiscing elit  Pellentesque et sapien ut erat porttitor suscipit id nec dui  Nam rhoncus mauris ac dui tristique bibendum  Aliquam molestie placerat gravida  Duis vitae tortor gravida libero semper cursus eu ut tortor  Nunc id orci orci  Suspendisse potenti  Phasellus vehicula leo sed erat rutrum sed blandit purus convallis   lt  p gt   lt p gt  Aliquam feugiat  neque a tempus rhoncus  neque dolor vulputate eros  non pellentesque elit lacus ut nunc  Pellentesque vel purus libero  ultrices condimentum lorem  Nam dictum faucibus mollis  Praesent adipiscing nunc sed dui ultricies molestie  Quisque facilisis purus quis felis molestie ut accumsan felis ultricies  Curabitur euismod est id est pretium accumsan  Praesent a mi in dolor feugiat vehicula quis at elit  Mauris lacus mauris  laoreet non molestie nec  adipiscing a nulla  Nullam rutrum  libero id pellentesque tempus  erat nibh ornare dolor  id accumsan est risus at leo  In convallis felis at eros condimentum adipiscing aliquam nisi faucibus  Integer arcu ligula  porttitor in fermentum vitae  lacinia nec dui   lt  p gt   lt  body gt   lt  html gt  EOT            fclose  stdin        echo stream get contents  pipes 1        fclose  pipes 1            It is important that you close any pipes before calling        proc close in order to avoid a deadlock      return value   proc close  process        echo  command returned  return value n

[php] Converting HTML to plain text in PHP for e-mail

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