Converting HTML to plain text in PHP for e-mail

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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?

Answers

Use html2text (example HTML to text), licensed under the Eclipse Public License. It uses PHP's DOM methods to load from HTML, and then iterates over the resulting DOM to extract plain text. Usage:

// when installed using the Composer package
$text = Html2TextHtml2Text::convert($html);

// usage when installed using html2text.php
require('html2text.php');
$text = convert_html_to_text($html);

Although incomplete, it is open source and contributions are welcome.

Issues with other conversion scripts:

Since html2text (GPL) is not EPL-compatible.
lkessler's link (attribution) is incompatible with most open source licenses.

Monday, August 22, 2022

mildse7en-3c81f46bf773

I hate to answer my own question but I did find a resolution to the issue, and hopefully someone can use this solution to get rid of the headaches this causes.

The issue is being caused by use of the mail() function. When I try to send the email, I have a long string of html code. IN FACT, TOO LONG! When I go past 78 characters a BANG! shows up and then jacks with my html or css. RFC 2822

The resolution is to change it to base-64 encode the data or add rn on my long lines of html code. Either way resolves the issue.

Thanks for the help everyone!

Saturday, October 15, 2022

c_f

I'd suggest using a HTML to Markdown converter.

https://github.com/Pixel418/Markdownify
https://code.google.com/p/pandoc/source/browse/trunk/html2markdown?r=1651

Thursday, October 13, 2022

abhinav_rawat

Set a reference to "Microsoft HTML object library".

Function HtmlToText(sHTML) As String
  Dim oDoc As HTMLDocument
  Set oDoc = New HTMLDocument
  oDoc.body.innerHTML = sHTML
  HtmlToText = oDoc.body.innerText
End Function

Tim

Monday, November 28, 2022

heyakhilesh

As Pekka was saying, you could simply use str_replace to insert data in your template. Just add a placeholder:

<div clas="header"></div>
<div class="content">{{content}}</div>
<div class="footer"></div>

Then replace the placeholder with your content:

$content = 'Whatever you want to insert...';
$tpl = file_get_contents('yourtemplate.html');
$tpl = str_replace('{{content}}', $content, $tpl);
mail($tpl, ...);

Thursday, September 15, 2022

prajwal

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Converting HTML to plain text in PHP for e-mail

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