How do I Strip HTML tags from a file using AWK?

[Handyman]

I have a need to extract text from Web pages and I would like to use AWK to process the html source to plain text. Has anyone done this before? Is there any easy way of doing it?

 

[derekludwig]

I would suggest<br>
<br>
gsub (/&lt;[^&gt;][^&gt;]*&gt;/, "", $0); }<br>
! /^ *$/ { print; }<br>
<br>
The RE in front of the { print } is to prevent <br>
blank lines from being printed.<br>
<br>
You could also do this with sed:<br>
<br>
sed -e 's/&lt;[^&gt;][^&gt;]*&gt;//g' -e '/^ *$/d'<br>
<br>
-- Derek<br>
<br>

 

[derekludwig]

BTW ... the RE that removes HTML tags will fail if the tag spans multiple lines. Correcting that is left as an exercize for the student .
Derek Ludwig
derek@ludwig.com

 

[teser]

I seem to have the same problem if the tag spans multiple lines. Any suggestions on how to do this?