Extracting text from HTML file using Python

The best piece of code I found for extracting text without getting javascript or not wanted things :

from urllib.request import urlopen
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = "http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2284783.stm"
html = urlopen(url).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, features="html.parser")

# kill all script and style elements
for script in soup(["script", "style"]):
    script.extract()    # rip it out

# get text
text = soup.get_text()

# break into lines and remove leading and trailing space on each
lines = (line.strip() for line in text.splitlines())
# break multi-headlines into a line each
chunks = (phrase.strip() for line in lines for phrase in line.split("  "))
# drop blank lines
text = '\n'.join(chunk for chunk in chunks if chunk)

print(text)

You just have to install BeautifulSoup before :

pip install beautifulsoup4

html2text is a Python program that does a pretty good job at this.

NOTE: NTLK no longer supports clean_html function

Original answer below, and an alternative in the comments sections.

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Use NLTK

I wasted my 4-5 hours fixing the issues with html2text. Luckily i could encounter NLTK.
It works magically.

import nltk   
from urllib import urlopen

url = "http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2284783.stm"    
html = urlopen(url).read()    
raw = nltk.clean_html(html)  
print(raw)