Web Scraping

Extracting HTML Content with Retained Line Break Formatting for Text Conversion

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Important

We don’t want to extract the content as a single string because this would result in losing all the formatting information provided by the HTML tags. Reformatting the content based on the document structure afterward is tedious, error-prone, and not scalable.

Instead, the idea is to retain the formatting information we need before removing all the HTML tags. Then, we can use this retained formatting information to generate a text file with the desired formatting.

Java

// Generate a placeholder string using UUID to avoid conflicts with the HTML content
String uniquePlaceholder = UUID.randomUUID().toString();
 
// This step retains line break information, which we will later replace with actual line breaks (\n)
String htmlContent = rawHtml.replace("<br />", "<span>" + uniquePlaceholder + "</span>");
 
// Parse the modified HTML content using Jsoup to extract plain text
// Replace the placeholder with actual line breaks (\n) to simulate the original formatting
String txtContent = Jsoup.parse(htmlContent).text().replace(uniquePlaceholder, "\n");
 
// Create a FileWriter to write the plain text content to a file
FileWriter writer = new FileWriter("output.txt");
 
// Write the plain text content into the file
writer.write(txtContent);
 
writer.close();
 

Code

This above code example assumes that <br /> is the only tag used to denote line breaks in the given HTML string. If other tags or methods are used for formatting, additional handling may be required.

Also note that, The FileWriter writer formats and writes the content into a text file, ensuring that line breaks are correctly represented using \n.