Is there a better way then using Lynx to convert HTML to Plaintext reliably in PHP

Question

I want to convert a HTML file with a table based layout to plaintext in order to send a multipart email via PHP.

I have tried a few different pre built classes / functions that I've found on SO, but none of them seem to produce decent results, which I believe is down to the table-based layout.

I don't want to roll my own class for stripping HTML and formatting the results as I am sure there are edge issues which I won't account for or be able to test until I come across them in production.

The best solution I've come up with so far is:

1. Create a temporary HTML file
2. Use something like shell_exec("/path/to/lynx -dump temporary.html"); to create a plaintext version of the email
3. Use some regex to get rid of any remaining unwanted tags

This works fine, but I'm a little worried that its not the optimal way of achieving a decent multipart email. Is anyone aware of a better way?

To clarify, I have already tried the following without success:

• html2text class - http://www.chuggnutt.com/html2text.php
• Markdownify - http://milianw.de/projects/markdownify/
• html2text version 2 - http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/php/html2texthowto.html
• http://journals.jevon.org/users/jevon-phd/entry/19818

Answer 1

PHP DomDocument should help you in this. You can traverse the DOM tree and strip out relevant content as you want.

http://php.net/manual/en/class.domdocument.php

Related question on SO :

Parse HTML with PHP's HTML DOMDocument

Answer 2

Lynx is not the best solution as I truly believe :) Also, I've used html2text myself and it works fine and is better than lynx.. anyway, if you prefer regexing it would rather be much more heavy than using the system shell (shell_exec, system, exec, popen), as you need to preg_replace all unnecessary tags, and in php regex is deadly slow. So I guess if it's on linux machine it's better to pass to html2text..