How do I read Text from HTML file ?

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vish
vish on 7 Feb 2011
Answered: moahaimen talib on 28 Oct 2017
I would like to know how is it possible to read only text from HTML file. I assume matlab reads the source code of the file due to which along with the actual text, it also reads the tags and other script related data. Please let me know how can this be solved.

Accepted Answer

Ned Gulley
Ned Gulley on 7 Feb 2011
Try something like this:
url = 'http://www.example.com/';
html = urlread(url);
% Use regular expressions to remove undesired markup.
txt = regexprep(html,'<script.*?/script>','');
txt = regexprep(txt,'<style.*?/style>','');
txt = regexprep(txt,'<.*?>','')
Once you have all the HTML, you can sift out the style and script blocks. Then remove any remaining tags and the result is reasonably clean. It won't be perfect, but it's easy to tune from here.
  2 Comments
Michael Lenihan
Michael Lenihan on 1 Dec 2011
Hi Ned, thats some useful code. Im trying to get a number from HTML code rather than txt. Any ideas?
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 1 Dec 2011
Same algorithm. You would use str2double() or sscanf() on the txt to convert to numeric form.

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More Answers (2)

Kaustubha Govind
Kaustubha Govind on 7 Feb 2011
if the HTML file consists of valid XML, you might be able to use xmlread.

moahaimen talib
moahaimen talib on 28 Oct 2017
hi i need to read just the email body how can i do that please

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