How to Extract Text from HTML [Easier Way]

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How to Extract Text from HTML

Before we jump into the modern software like Octoparse or browser solutions like ONLINETEXTTOOLS that can automate many of these processes, let’s look at what web developers used to do when they had to extract Text from HTML.

How Computer Programmers and Web Developers Used To Do It

The old way to extract text from an HTML page was by using regular expressions and Xpath code. Regular expressions are a type of coding that can be used to find patterns in strings and then manipulate them somehow. Xpath is another kind of coding used to select nodes (parts) of an XML document. You can think of it as similar to CSS selectors but for XML documents instead of HTML pages.

Easier Way When Using Octoparse Service

Finding the right service to extract Text from HTML is a matter of preference, but if you’re looking for a tool that will do it all in three steps, look no further than Octoparse. It’s a web-based application that allows users to perform an “auto-detection” process on their web pages by entering their URL and then running data scraping.

Check it out here

Octoparse Makes Data Extraction Easy For Non-Coders

If you’re not a programmer or don’t have the time or money to pay someone else to write your code for you, Octoparse is a great choice for data extraction. For example, if you want to get data from an HTML website and export it as Excel or JSON file, all you need to do is:

  • Download the and install it on your computer;
  • Open Octoparse on your desktop;
  • Paste the URL of the page where you want to extract text into the box in the “Url” tab;
  • Run data scraping

Octoparse HTML To Text Converter Usage Examples

Now that you know how to use Octoparse HTML to text converter let’s look at some examples of how you could use it.

Example 1: Extracting text from a Web Page: If you have a website with lots of content and want to extract text from a webpage, Octoparse will make this a breeze! Just paste in your site’s source URL and convert. You’ll get an output file with all the text in it.

Example 2: Extracting Text from HTML Forms: If you’re working with an HTML form that has fields containing user-entered data and want to extract just those values into another file or spreadsheet, this is also easy! All you have to do is select all fields within the form before running the program. Then click on run data scraping and wait for Octoparse to process its magic.

 

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