>>1520260The quickest and easiest way to extract only the text from ~3,000 .html files depends a bit on your environment, but here's a very efficient method using Python and BeautifulSoup:
1. Install BeautifulSoup (if not already):
pip install beautifulsoup4
2. Python Script to Extract Text from All HTML Files:
import os
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
# Folder containing your HTML files
html_folder = "path/to/your/html/files"
output_folder = "path/to/save/text/files"
os.makedirs(output_folder, exist_ok=True)
for filename in os.listdir(html_folder):
if filename.endswith(".html"):
file_path = os.path.join(html_folder, filename)
with open(file_path, "r", encoding="utf-8") as f:
soup = BeautifulSoup(f, "html.parser")
text = soup.get_text(separator="\n", strip=True) # Extract clean text
# Save to .txt with the same base name
output_path = os.path.join(output_folder, f"{os.path.splitext(filename)[0]}.txt")
with open(output_path, "w", encoding="utf-8") as out_f:
out_f.write(text)
Notes:
soup.get_text() strips out all tags, scripts, styles, etc.
separator="\n" helps preserve structure.
You can modify the script to skip headers/footers or extract from specific tags if needed.
