html2text

A simple Golang package to convert HTML to plain text, with no external dependencies. It processes input character-by-character in a single pass, with occasional forward lookups (e.g., for HTML entities).

The conversion:

• Strips out the section, along with and <script> tags.
• Converts HTML tags to plain text and parses HTML entities into the characters they represent.
• Converts links into their href attribute, or to the inner text <link> format when the WithLinksInnerText option is enabled.

The primary use case is converting HTML emails into plain text.

The package includes a comprehensive test suite in html2text_test.go. It follows semantic versioning, and no breaking changes are planned.

Feel free to submit a pull request with suggestions for improvement. However, please note that the library is now considered feature-complete and API‑stable. If you require more advanced functionality or need to regularly process malformed HTML input, you should consider using an alternative package listed below.

Install

go get github.com/k3a/html2text

Usage

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"github.com/k3a/html2text"
)

func main() {
	html := `<html><head><title>Good</title></head><body><strong>clean</strong> text</body>`
	
	plain := html2text.HTML2Text(html)
			  
	fmt.Println(plain)
}

/*	Outputs:

	clean text
*/

Note: The output is plain text, do not embed the result back into HTML without escaping.

To see all features in action, take a look at html2text_test.go.

Alternatives

• https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text (heavier, with more features, uses golang.org/x/net/html parser)

License

MIT