HTML To Plain Text

A simple gem that provide code to convert HTML into a plain text alternative. Line breaks from HTML block level elements will be maintained. Lists and tables will also maintain a little bit of formatting.

• Line breaks will be approximated using the generally established default margins for HTML tags (i.e.

  tag generates two line breaks,

  generates one)
• Lists items will be numbered or bulleted with an asterisk
• 
  tags will add line breaks

• ---

  tags will add a string of hyphens to serve as a horizontal rule
• elements will enclosed in "|" delimiters
  tags will have the href URL appended to the text in parentheses
  Formatting tags like or will be stripped

  Formatting inside

   or <plaintext> elements will be honored</p>
  </li>
  <li>Code-like tags like <script> or <style> will be stripped</li>
  </ul>
  <p>HTML can also be converted to a Markdown approximation instead. In Markdown mode:</p>
  <ul>
  <li>Headings are prefixed with # characters</li>
  <li>Formatting tags like <strong>, <em>, <del>, and <code> are converted to Markdown markers</li>
  <li><a> tags become Markdown links and <img> tags become Markdown images</li>
  <li>
  <blockquote> content is prefixed with "> "</li>
  <li>
  <pre> blocks become fenced code blocks</li>
  <li>Data tables are formatted as Markdown tables with a header separator row</li>
  </ul>
  <h2 id="Usage">Usage</h2>
  <pre><code class="ruby">require 'html_to_plain_text'
  
  html = "<h1>Hello</h1><p>world!</p>"
  HtmlToPlainText.plain_text(html) # => "Hello\n\nworld!"
  
  HtmlToPlainText.markdown(html) # => "# Hello\n\nworld!"
  # equivalent to HtmlToPlainText.plain_text(html, markdown: true)
  

  Options

  • show_links (default true) - Include link URLs and image sources in the output.
  • markdown (default false) - Format the output as Markdown instead of plain text.
  • all_tables (default false) - Format all tables as data tables. By default only tables with a non-zero border attribute or a thead or tbody element are formatted as data tables; other tables are assumed to be used for layout only and their cells are separated with spaces instead of "|" delimiters.
  • ignore_nav (default false) - Suppress non-content elements from the output. When set, header, footer, and nav tags are omitted along with any elements that have a role attribute of navigation, banner, or contentinfo.
  • selector (default nil) - A CSS selector limiting the output to matching elements. Only the contents of elements matching the selector are included in the output (e.g. selector: "#main, article"). Only elements within the body of the document are matched. An ArgumentError is raised if the selector is not a valid CSS selector.

  Installation

  Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

  gem "html_to_plain_text"
  

  And then execute:

  $ bundle install
  

  Or install it yourself as:

  $ gem install html_to_plain_text
  

  Contributing

  Open a pull request on GitHub.

  Please use the standardrb syntax and lint your code with standardrb --fix before submitting.

  License

  The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

  Generated on Sat Jul 11 21:56:29 2026 by yard 0.9.44 (ruby-4.0.2).