Strip HTML Tags From Multiple Files Automatically — Desktop & CLI Options

Methods: GUI tools, command-line utilities, and scripts

Below are common approaches, ranging from easy point-and-click tools to powerful scripts for automation.

GUI tools

• Desktop apps or text-processing utilities that let you select a folder, set rules (which tags to remove/keep), preview results, and run batches. These are user-friendly for non-technical users.

Pros:

• Visual previews
• Easier to configure for one-off jobs

Cons:

• Less flexible for automation
• May have licensing costs

Command-line utilities

• Tools like sed, awk, grep, perl, and specialized utilities (e.g., html2text, pup, hxnormalize/hxselect from HTML-XML-utils) can quickly process many files with scripting.
• Ideal for automation, integration into pipelines, and handling very large file sets.

Pros:

• Fast and scriptable
• Integrates with cron/CI

Cons:

• Steeper learning curve
• Risk of destructive changes if misused

Custom scripts

• Languages like Python, Node.js, Ruby, or Go offer libraries (BeautifulSoup, lxml, html.parser in Python; cheerio in Node.js) to parse HTML robustly and extract text while preserving structure.
• Recommended when you need fine-grained control (e.g., preserve certain tags, handle malformed HTML, or follow links for inlining).

Pros:

• Most control and adaptability
• Easy to extend for complex rules

Cons:

• Requires programming skills

Example solutions

Below are concise examples for common environments. Back up your files before running batch operations.

1) Quick command-line: html2text (preserves readable formatting)

Install html2text (Python package) or use a system package if available.

Example (bash) to process all .html files in a directory and save .txt outputs:

for f in *.html; do   html2text "$f" > "${f%.html}.txt" done 

2) Robust parsing with Python + BeautifulSoup

This preserves visible text, converts block tags to newlines, and can selectively remove tags while keeping others.

Save as strip_tags.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python3 from bs4 import BeautifulSoup from pathlib import Path import sys def strip_html_file(in_path: Path, out_path: Path, keep_tags=None):     html = in_path.read_text(encoding='utf-8', errors='ignore')     soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')     if keep_tags:         for tag in soup.find_all():             if tag.name not in keep_tags:                 tag.unwrap()     else:         for tag in soup.find_all():             tag.unwrap()     text = soup.get_text(separator=' ')     out_path.write_text(text, encoding='utf-8') if __name__ == "__main__":     src = Path(sys.argv[1])     dst = Path(sys.argv[2])     keep = set(sys.argv[3].split(',')) if len(sys.argv) > 3 else None     for p in src.rglob('*.html'):         rel = p.relative_to(src)         out_file = dst / rel.with_suffix('.txt')         out_file.parent.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)         strip_html_file(p, out_file, keep_tags=keep) 

Run:

python3 strip_tags.py /path/to/html_dir /path/to/output_dir p,br 

3) Fast in-place batch with Perl (simple tag removal — not HTML-aware)

This is quick but unsafe for malformed HTML and will remove anything between < and >.

find . -name '*.html' -print0 | xargs -0 -I{} sh -c 'perl -0777 -pe "s/<[^>]*>//g" "{}" > "{}.txt"' 

Tips for preserving important content

• Keep block tags (p, div, h1–h6) converted to newlines to preserve paragraphs and headings.
• Convert
  and
• to line breaks or list markers to keep readability.
• Preserve semantic tags like ,

  , and 
  
   or convert them to fenced code blocks/indented text.

• Decide how to handle images and media: replace with alt text (if present) or a marker like [IMAGE: alt text].
• For multilingual content, ensure correct encoding detection (use chardet in Python or specify encodings).