Converting HTML to plain text in PHP for e-mail

user_7596 0
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I use TinyMCE to allow minimal formatting of text within my site. From the HTML that's produced, I'd like to convert it to plain text for e-mail. I've been using a class called html2text, but it's really lacking in UTF-8 support, among other things. I do, however, like that it maps certain HTML tags to plain text formatting — like putting underscores around text that previously had <i> tags in the HTML.

Does anyone use a similar approach to converting HTML to plain text in PHP? And if so: Do you recommend any third-party classes that I can use? Or how do you best tackle this issue?

plaintext email html php
14 Answers

There's the trusty strip_tags function. It's not pretty though. It'll only sanitize. You could combine it with a string replace to get your fancy underscores.


<?php
// to strip all tags and wrap italics with underscore
strip_tags(str_replace(array("<i>", "</i>"), array("_", "_"), $text));

// to preserve anchors...
str_replace("|a", "<a", strip_tags(str_replace("<a", "|a", $text)));

?>
user_2269170

Converting from HTML to text using a DOMDocument is a viable solution. Consider HTML2Text, which requires PHP5:

Regarding UTF-8, the write-up on the "howto" page states:

PHP's own support for unicode is quite poor, and it does not always handle utf-8 correctly. Although the html2text script uses unicode-safe methods (without needing the mbstring module), it cannot always cope with PHP's own handling of encodings. PHP does not really understand unicode or encodings like utf-8, and uses the base encoding of the system, which tends to be one of the ISO-8859 family. As a result, what may look to you like a valid character in your text editor, in either utf-8 or single-byte, may well be misinterpreted by PHP. So even though you think you are feeding a valid character into html2text, you may well not be.

The author provides several approaches to solving this and states that version 2 of HTML2Text (using DOMDocument) has UTF-8 support.

Note the restrictions for commercial use.

lkessler_301760

You can use lynx with -stdin and -dump options to achieve that:

<?php
$descriptorspec = array(
   0 => array("pipe", "r"),  // stdin is a pipe that the child will read from
   1 => array("pipe", "w"),  // stdout is a pipe that the child will write to
   2 => array("file", "/tmp/htmp2txt.log", "a") // stderr is a file to write to
);

$process = proc_open('lynx -stdin -dump 2>&1', $descriptorspec, $pipes, '/tmp', NULL);

if (is_resource($process)) {
    // $pipes now looks like this:
    // 0 => writeable handle connected to child stdin
    // 1 => readable handle connected to child stdout
    // Any error output will be appended to htmp2txt.log

    $stdin = $pipes[0];
    fwrite($stdin,  <<<'EOT'
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
 <title>TEST</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1><span>Lorem Ipsum</span></h1>

<h4>"Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..."</h4>
<h5>"There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..."</h5>
<p>
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque et sapien ut erat porttitor suscipit id nec dui. Nam rhoncus mauris ac dui tristique bibendum. Aliquam molestie placerat gravida. Duis vitae tortor gravida libero semper cursus eu ut tortor. Nunc id orci orci. Suspendisse potenti. Phasellus vehicula leo sed erat rutrum sed blandit purus convallis.
</p>
<p>
Aliquam feugiat, neque a tempus rhoncus, neque dolor vulputate eros, non pellentesque elit lacus ut nunc. Pellentesque vel purus libero, ultrices condimentum lorem. Nam dictum faucibus mollis. Praesent adipiscing nunc sed dui ultricies molestie. Quisque facilisis purus quis felis molestie ut accumsan felis ultricies. Curabitur euismod est id est pretium accumsan. Praesent a mi in dolor feugiat vehicula quis at elit. Mauris lacus mauris, laoreet non molestie nec, adipiscing a nulla. Nullam rutrum, libero id pellentesque tempus, erat nibh ornare dolor, id accumsan est risus at leo. In convallis felis at eros condimentum adipiscing aliquam nisi faucibus. Integer arcu ligula, porttitor in fermentum vitae, lacinia nec dui.
</p>
</body>
</html>
EOT
    );
    fclose($stdin);

    echo stream_get_contents($pipes[1]);
    fclose($pipes[1]);

    // It is important that you close any pipes before calling
    // proc_close in order to avoid a deadlock
    $return_value = proc_close($process);

    echo "command returned $return_value\n";
}
user_2353620

If you want to convert the HTML special characters and not just remove them as well as strip things down and prepare for plain text this was the solution that worked for me...

function htmlToPlainText($str){
    $str = str_replace('&nbsp;', ' ', $str);
    $str = html_entity_decode($str, ENT_QUOTES | ENT_COMPAT , 'UTF-8');
    $str = html_entity_decode($str, ENT_HTML5, 'UTF-8');
    $str = html_entity_decode($str);
    $str = htmlspecialchars_decode($str);
    $str = strip_tags($str);

    return $str;
}

$string = '<p>this is (&nbsp;) a test</p>
<div>Yes this is! &amp; does it get "processed"? </div>'

htmlToPlainText($string);
// "this is ( ) a test. Yes this is! & does it get processed?"`

html_entity_decode w/ ENT_QUOTES | ENT_XML1 converts things like &#39; htmlspecialchars_decode converts things like &amp; html_entity_decode converts things like '&lt; and strip_tags removes any HTML tags left over.

user_57486700

For texts in utf-8, it worked for me mb_convert_encoding. To process everything regardless of errors, make sure you use the "@".

The basic code I use is:

$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML(mb_convert_encoding($html, 'HTML-ENTITIES', 'UTF-8'));

$body = $dom->getElementsByTagName('body')->item(0);
echo $body->textContent;

If you want something more advanced, you can iteratively analyze the nodes, but you will encounter many problems with whitespaces.

I have implemented a converter based on what I say here. If you are interested, you can download it from git https://github.com/kranemora/html2text

It may serve as a reference to make yours

You can use it like this:

$html = <<<EOF
<p>Welcome to <strong>html2text<strong></p>
<p>It's <em>works</em> for you?</p>
EOF;

$html2Text = new \kranemora\Html2Text\Html2Text;
$text = $html2Text->convert($html);
user_120117940
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