paring a html table

**nagileon** · 01-08-2012

Hi there,
I need to change this:

<head> <body> <table border="1"> <tr> <th>AAA</th> <th>BBB</th> <th>CCC</th> </tr> <tr> <td>1</td> <td>11</td> <td>111</td> </tr> <tr> <td>2</td> <td>22</td> <td>222</td> </tr> <tr> <td>3</td> <td>33</td> <td>333</td> </tr> </table> </body> </head>

into a csv table.

I have learned how to get rid of a new line character:
sed -i ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/ /g' t1.html

Next step would be to copy everything between <table border="1"> and </table> to a new file. So the question is how do I use sed grep awk etc to accomplish that ?

**atreyu** · 01-08-2012

If you have python installed (and chances are you do), you can try the text2html.py python script. It will change your html to plain text. You can then redirect the output to a file.

**drl** · 01-09-2012

Hi.

A similarly named utility as that mentioned by atreyu, html2text, but written in c++, is also available. Here is an example, showing the context, your input file, the intermediate results file, and those results changed by sed:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# @(#) s1	Demonstrate conversion of HTML to text, tables, html2text.
# http://www.mbayer.de/html2text/

# Utility functions: print-as-echo, print-line-with-visual-space, debug.
# export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin"
pe() { for _i;do printf "%s" "$_i";done; printf "\n"; }
pl() { pe;pe "-----" ;pe "$*"; }
db() { ( printf " db, ";for _i;do printf "%s" "$_i";done;printf "\n" ) >&2 ; }
db() { : ; }
C=$HOME/bin/context && [ -f $C ] && $C html2text

FILE=${1-data1}

pl " Input data file $FILE:"
cat $FILE

pl " Results, intermediate file:"
html2text $FILE |
tee f1 |
sed -e 's/^|//' -e 's/|$//' -e 's/|/,/g' > f2
cat f1

pl " Results, final (massaged by sed):"
cat f2

exit 0

producing:

Code:

% ./s1

Environment: LC_ALL = C, LANG = C
(Versions displayed with local utility "version")
OS, ker|rel, machine: Linux, 2.6.26-2-amd64, x86_64
Distribution        : Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.8 (lenny) 
GNU bash 3.2.39
html2text - ( /usr/bin/html2text, 2008-07-23 )

-----
 Input data file data1:
<head> <body> <table border="1"> <tr> <th>AAA</th> <th>BBB</th> <th>CCC</th> </tr> <tr> <td>1</td> <td>11</td> <td>111</td> </tr> <tr> <td>2</td> <td>22</td> <td>222</td> </tr> <tr> <td>3</td> <td>33</td> <td>333</td> </tr> </table> </body> </head>

-----
 Results, intermediate file:
            
|AAA|BBB|CCC|
|1  |11 |111|
|2  |22 |222|
|3  |33 |333|

-----
 Results, final (massaged by sed):
            
AAA,BBB,CCC
1  ,11 ,111
2  ,22 ,222
3  ,33 ,333

The code is available already compiled in the repositories for (at least) Debian and CentOS, and the source is available at the URL noted in the script comments.

Best wishes ... cheers, drl

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