HTML2MARKDOWN

html2markdown - converts HTML to markdown-formatted text

html2markdown [pandoc-options] [-- special-options] [input-file or URL]

html2markdown converts input-file or URL (or text from stdin) from HTML to markdown-formatted plain text. If a URL is specified, html2markdown uses an available program (e.g. wget, w3m, lynx or curl) to fetch its contents. Output is sent to stdout unless an output file is specified using the -o option.

html2markdown uses the character encoding specified in the “Content-type” meta tag. If this is not present, or if input comes from stdin, UTF–8 is assumed. A character encoding may be specified explicitly using the -e special option.

html2markdown is a wrapper for pandoc, so all of pandoc’s options may be used. See pandoc(1) for a complete list. The following options are most relevant:

-s, --standalone

Include title, author, and date information (if present) at the top of markdown output.

-o FILE, --output=FILE

Write output to FILE instead of stdout.

--strict

Use strict markdown syntax, with no extensions or variants.

--reference-links

Use reference-style links, rather than inline links, in writing markdown or reStructuredText.

-R, --parse-raw

Parse untranslatable HTML codes as raw HTML.

--no-wrap

Disable text wrapping in output. (Default is to wrap text.)

-H FILE, --include-in-header=FILE

Include contents of FILE at the end of the header. Implies -s.

-B FILE, --include-before-body=FILE

Include contents of FILE at the beginning of the document body.

-A FILE, --include-after-body=FILE

Include contents of FILE at the end of the document body.

-C FILE, --custom-header=FILE

Use contents of FILE as the document header (overriding the default header, which can be printed using pandoc -D markdown). Implies -s.

In addition, the following special options may be used. The special options must be separated from the html2markdown command and any regular pandoc options by the delimiter ‘--’, as in

html2markdown -o foo.txt -- -g 'curl -u bar:baz' -e latin1 \ www.foo.com

-e encoding, --encoding=encoding

Assume the character encoding encoding in reading HTML. (Note: encoding will be passed to iconv; a list of available encodings may be obtained using iconv -l.) If this option is not specified and input is not from stdin, html2markdown will try to extract the character encoding from the “Content-type” meta tag. If no character encoding is specified in this way, or if input is from stdin, UTF–8 will be assumed.

-g command, --grabber=command

Use command to fetch the contents of a URL. (By default, html2markdown searches for an available program or text-based browser to fetch the contents of a URL.)

pandoc(1), iconv(1)

John MacFarlane and Recai Oktas