Example: html string to plain text

[sowinski]

Hi,

can someone help me to write some code to transform a html string into a plain text string?

import pandoc
html = "<p>This is a test</p>"
text = pandoc.magic(html)
print(text)
>>This is a test

Would be nice to see more examples in the docs

[boisgera]

Hi @sowinski !

The following code should do the trick:

>>> import pandoc
>>> html = "<p>This is a test</p>"
>>> doc = pandoc.read(html, format="html")
>>> doc
Pandoc(Meta({}), [Para([Str('This'), Space(), Str('is'), Space(), Str('a'), Space(), Str('test')])])
>>> markdown = pandoc.write(doc) 
>>> markdown
'This is a test\n'

Basically, read converts from any format to the Python format (here, what the doc variable contains) and write from the Python format to any format (markdown being the default). More relevant information can be found in the API documentation here and it comes with examples.

Would be nice to see more examples in the docs

I agree that the documentation is not very beginner-friendly ; there is a lot of examples in the doc but most of them are rather advanced. The use case for pandoc (this Python library) is mostly the automation of document analysis and transform, which is in itself a rather advanced topic ; therefore I have prioritized the documentation effort towards this use case and implicitly assume that typical user already knows a lot about pandoc (the CLI tool, its document model, etc).

If you have a simpler use case (say only convert from one format to another), I'd advise you to :

• try the pandoc command-line tool

  $ echo "<p>This is a test</p>" | pandoc -f html -t markdown
  

• If you want to use it from python, use a thin wrapper on top of this tool, such as pypandoc.

But if you need / want to stick with this library and need some additional information, I'll try to answer ; Discussions should be the appropriate place to ask for help most of the time.

Cheers,

Sébastien