Linux – How to convert HTML to text

html2text is a command-line tool that converts HTML to Markdown.

You will most probably get very frustrated trying to use sed to do this without error. The reason is touched upon in a legendary SO post. In very basic cases it might work, but it will come back to haunt you of you make it a habit, so learn how to do it correctly directly instead. Using a ready tool such as html2text is a lot better than trying to regex it out by hand.

Use the script utility to capture the terminal output to a file (ansi color control characters included) and then convert it to html with ansi2html script. Eg:

inigo:tmp> script
Script started, file is typescript
inigo:tmp> ls
#
# lots of colour output
# 
inigo:tmp> exit
exit
Script done, file is typescript
inigo:tmp> cat typescript  | ansi2html.sh > typescript.html

If using PuTTY, "All session output" login option will also keep the ansi color codes.

As an alternative to ansi2html, you could use aha - Ansi HTML Adapter.