html_text_clean: Cleaned text for extraction

In zuhtml: Parse 'HTML' with a Bundled 'Gumbo' Parser

Cleaned text for extraction

Description

Text as a reader would want it from a page, rather than exactly as parsed. It is not a browser's innerText: there is no layout or CSS, and hidden elements are included. The rules are fixed and documented:

• text inside ⁠<script>⁠, ⁠<style>⁠ and ⁠<template>⁠ is skipped, and so are comments;

• runs of whitespace (space, tab, newline, carriage return, form feed) collapse to a single space, except inside ⁠<pre>⁠, ⁠<textarea>⁠, ⁠<listing>⁠ and ⁠<plaintext>⁠, where whitespace is kept;

• ⁠<br>⁠ is a line break; each block element is a line break before and after, and adjacent block boundaries give a single line break. The block elements are address, article, aside, blockquote, body, caption, center, dd, details, dialog, dir, div, dl, dt, fieldset, figcaption, figure, footer, form, h1 to h6, head, header, hgroup, hr, html, legend, li, listing, main, menu, nav, ol, optgroup, option, p, plaintext, pre, section, summary, table, tbody, tfoot, thead, title, tr, ul and xmp;

• table cells (⁠<td>⁠, ⁠<th>⁠) are separated by a space.

Usage

html_text_clean(x, trim = TRUE, nbsp = TRUE)

Arguments

x	A zuhtml_document or zuhtml_nodeset.
trim	If TRUE, no whitespace at the start or end. If FALSE, whitespace there is kept, collapsed to a single space.
nbsp	If TRUE, treat non-breaking spaces (U+00A0) as whitespace, so they collapse like spaces; inside ⁠<pre>⁠ they become spaces.

Value

A character vector as long as x: the cleaned text of each element, document, fragment or text node; NA for other nodes and for missing nodes.

See Also

html_text() for the text exactly as parsed.

Other node values: html_attr(), html_markdown(), html_name(), html_serialize(), html_strings(), html_text()

Examples

doc <- html_parse(paste0(
  "<div><h1>Title</h1>\n  <p>Some   <b>bold</b> text.<br>New line",
  "<script>ignored()</script></p><pre>  kept\n  as is</pre></div>"
))
div <- html_element(doc, "div")
cat(html_text_clean(div))
html_text(div)

zuhtml documentation built on Oct. 6, 2026, 5:06 p.m.