How to convert HTML to text?

I don't think curl has a built in HTML processor. However:

lynx --dump <URL>

does the trick.

If you still want to use curl, you could use html2text (available in Ubuntu).


You can install html2text (an advanced HTML-to-text converter) and the usage is straight forward:

$ html2text http://example.com/
$ cat file.html | html2text -o file.txt

Install by:

  • Linux: apt-get install html2text
  • OS X: brew install html2text

Example with curl:

$ curl -sL google.com | html2text
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