WAWalterGR·Jun 4, 2022
https://github.com/aaronsw/html2text has more information, e.g. context.
In Html2text.py by Aaron Swartzaaronsw
html2text
Python2013–2022
aaronsw / html2text
html2text
Convert HTML to Markdown-formatted text.
6Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.8KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Convert HTML to Markdown-formatted text.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-01-20 14:06:26 UTC to 2022-06-04 14:36:41 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesHoly hell. It's incredibly inspiring what aaronsw was able to do. It's a list of links, and I kept scrolling expecting to run into text. Nope. Just a gigantic list of links, and choosing a random one seems to result in actual data: https://web.archive.org/web/20090410081645/http://www.rdfabo...
Well, almost actual data. The 4.7MB tarball link is broken, but the author notes:
> For the detailed Census statistics, you'll have to download the raw Census data files from the Census Bureau, my Perl script and the patch file below and run it yourself because the files are too big for me to offer as a download!
And the perl script link still works. From experience, I know how valuable that can be. The only reason I was able to help build The Pile (books3) is because of aaronsw's html2text script (https://github.com/aaronsw/html2text). Out of at l
Read the rest
east four conversion options I tried, that script was the only one that was flexible enough to be modified to spit out human-readable text at scale.
Thanks for the nostalgia. 2008 doesn't feel like yesterday anymore, but it will always feel incredibly special. That era was just different, and it's a shame that one only realizes it in hindsight. Otherwise I would've slowed down just to look around more and appreciate getting a glimpse.
P.S. although most of the data download links are dead, there is a trick to recover some of them: try to access the links on the live site. archive.org doesn't always snag tarballs, but occasionally (very occasionally) the tarballs survive till today.
You should also check the parent site itself, not just the direct url to the tarball. Sometimes you'll get lucky and the site merely went through a reshuffle rather than being taken offline.
Email can have multiple parallel payloads in different formats (see MIME). It's part of the spec, not a hack.
The OP is suggesting that if LKML gets multiple payloads where it can understand one of them it just selects the one it can understand. This is what other text-only clients do.
They're not suggesting parsing html into text (tangentially, if they were, there are much better approaches than the one you linked. One of the most commonly used ones is originally by Aaron Schwartz https://github.com/aaronsw/html2text )
In I Implemented /dev/printerfact in Rust"We should do a web-to-markdown thing since so much websites are unreadable."
THE FASCINATOR: that cheeky hacker Aaron beat you to this ~ http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/html2text/html2text.py and http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/html2text/ ... old, interesting to see if it's still usable after almost 15yrs.
Latest code at: https://github.com/aaronsw/html2text
In Show HN: A Web-to-RSS Parser in Common LispI believe SBP (aaronsw's digital executor) is planning to make sure his domain is maintained and all the content remains available. But I do think it's nice to have this stuff in non-HTML form--ePub especially is great.
Be sure to ping rememberaaronsw@gmail.com (Aaron's friends and family) and let them know.
Also, did you look into using html2text (https://github.com/aaronsw/html2text) to generate the Markdown? Might be a fitting tribute to try it. It would be helpful to include the generating scripts in the repo no matter what.
In Raw Thought: The Weblog of Aaron Swartz in Markdown, PDF, and ePub