Steve Ericson said:
Thanks, Susan. I tried it, but the output file was html as well.
Besides, the interface is hopeless, with a disappearing menu.
Steve
If you have Cygwin for Windows (it's free), you can write a shell script
that will do what you want. Here's a first shot at such a script. It does a
pretty good job. I prefer tab-delimited files over comma-delimited, so
that's what this does.
It runs pretty slowly, but WTF?
When cuttting and pasting the code, take care NOT to create any blanks at
the end of any line of code (especially after the \ character), or it won't
work.
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#!/bin/ksh
# table2text
#
# usage: table2text file-name
#
# Eliminates (almost) all HTML garbage from a file,
# keeping only the text contents of a <table>.
#
# It's not (yet) smart enough to eliminate the text
# of embedded style-sheets.
case $# in
1) file="$1";;
*) exit 1;;
esac
cat "$file" | \
sed -e "s,\~,,g" \
-e "s,<[Tt][Aa][Bb][Ll][Ee][^>]*>,\~TABLE\~,g" \
-e "s,</[Tt][Aa][Bb][Ll][Ee][^>]*>,\~/TABLE\~,g" \
-e "s,<[Tt][Rr][^>]*>,\~TR\~,g" \
-e "s,</[Tt][Rr][^>]*>,\~/TR\~,g" \
-e "s,<[Tt][Dd][^>]*>,\~TD\~,g" \
-e "s,</[Tt][Dd][^>]*>,\~/TD\~,g" \
-e "s,</*[^>]*>,,g" \
-e "s,\ , ,g" \
-e "s, *$,," \
-e "s,^ *,," \
-e "s, *, ,g" | \
grep -v "^$" | \
while read instrg
do
outstrg=`echo "$instrg" | \
sed -e "s,\~/TABLE\~,,g" \
-e "s,\~/TR\~,\~,g" \
-e "s,\~/TD\~, ,g" \
-e "s,\~TABLE\~,\~,g" \
-e "s,\~TR\~,,g" \
-e "s,\~TD\~,,g"`
echo "$outstrg\c"
done | \
tr "~" "\012"
exit 0
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