html2text is a very simple script that uses DOM methods to convert HTML into a format similar to what would be rendered by a browser - perfect for places where you need a quick text representation. For example:

<html>
<title>Ignored Title</title>
<body>
  <h1>Hello, World!</h1>

  <p>This is some e-mail content.
  Even though it has whitespace and newlines, the e-mail converter
  will handle it correctly.

  <p>Even mismatched tags.</p>

  <div>A div</div>
  <div>Another div</div>
  <div>A div<div>within a div</div></div>

  <a href="http://foo.com">A link</a>

</body>
</html>

Will be converted into:

Hello, World!

This is some e-mail content. Even though it has whitespace and newlines, the e-mail converter will handle it correctly.

Even mismatched tags.

A div
Another div
A div
within a div

[A link](http://foo.com)

See the original blog post or the related StackOverflow answer.

Installing

You can use Composer to add the package to your project:

{
  "require": {
    "soundasleep/html2text": "~1.1"
  }
}

And then use it quite simply:

$text = \Soundasleep\Html2Text::convert($html);

You can also include the supplied html2text.php and use $text = convert_html_to_text($html); instead.

Options

Option	Default	Description
ignore_errors	`false`	Set to `true` to ignore any XML parsing errors.
drop_links	`false`	Set to `true` to not render links as `[http://foo.com](My Link)`, but rather just `My Link`.
char_set	`'auto'`	Specify a specific character set. Pass multiple character sets (comma separated) to detect encoding, default is ASCII,UTF-8

Pass along options as a second argument to convert, for example:

$options = array(
  'ignore_errors' => true,
  // other options go here
);
$text = \Soundasleep\Html2Text::convert($html, $options);

Tests

Some very basic tests are provided in the tests/ directory. Run them with composer install && vendor/bin/phpunit.

Troubleshooting

Class 'DOMDocument' not found

You need to install the PHP XML extension for your PHP version. e.g. apt-get install php7.4-xml

License

html2text is licensed under MIT, making it suitable for both Eclipse and GPL projects.

Other versions

Also see html2text_ruby, a Ruby implementation.

Html2Text Laravel Package