How to convert html entities to readable text

character encodinghtmltext processing

I want html number entities like ę and want to convert it to real character. I have emails mostly from linkedin that look like this:

chciałabym zapytać, czy rozważa Pan takze
udział w nowych projektach w Warszawie ? Obecnie poszukujemy
specjalisty javascript/architekta z bardzo dobrą
znajomością Angular.js do projektu, który dotyczy
systemu, służącego do monitorowania i
zarządzania flotą pojazdów. Zespół, do
którego poszukujemy

I'm using clawsmail, switching to html don't convert it to text, I've try to copy and use

xclip -o -sel clip | html2text | less

but it didn't convert the entities. Is there a way to have that text using command line tools?

The only way I can think of is to use data:text/html,<PASTE THE EMAIL> and open it in a browser, but would prefer the command line.

Best Answer

With Free recode (formerly known as GNU recode):

recode html < file

If you don't have recode or HTML::Entities and only need to decode &#x<hex>; entities, you could do it by hand with:

perl -Mopen=locale -pe 's/&#x([\da-f]+);/chr hex $1/gie'

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How to convert to HTML code

The perl CGI module has a escapeHTML function that makes it pretty easy:

perl -e 'use CGI qw(escapeHTML); print escapeHTML("<hi>\n");'

Or to do an entire file:

perl -p -e 'BEGIN { use CGI qw(escapeHTML); } $_ = escapeHTML($_);'  FILENAME

Copy markdown input to the clipboard as rich text

As it turns out, the link in the question hinted at a working solution in the form of xclip:

pandoc -S file.mkd | xclip -t text/html

...and then I can paste it straight into the document in libreoffice, properly formatted. This works with the versions of the programs in the Ubuntu 13.04 repositories (pandoc 1.10.1 and xclip 0.12) -- the -t option for xclip especially is only in version 0.12 or above. The -S option of pandoc makes it produce 'typographically correct output', so -- is turned into an en-dash, --- is turned into an em-dash, and a few other things.

If you want to use the ctrl-v clipboard, use:

pandoc -S file.mkd | xclip -t text/html -selection clipboard

Edit: if you're running OS X (with pbcopy rather than xclip), use:

pandoc -S file.mkd | textutil -stdin -format html -convert rtf -stdout | pbcopy

To transform selected text without creating a file, you can use:

xclip -o | pandoc -S | xclip -t text/html

...this can, of course, be mapped to a keyboard shortcut.

This can work well with a number of text markup formats as input, see the pandoc guide for some more information on how to accomplish this (you might need to use the -f/--from/-r/--read option, especially if you're using the xclip|pandoc|xclip version).

As a side note, you can also read an already-existing HTML file into xclip:

xclip -t text/html <file.html

<file.html xclip -t text/html

Best Answer

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How to convert to HTML code

Copy markdown input to the clipboard as rich text

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