How to Preserve Line Breaks When Converting HTML to Plain Text with Jsoup?

Preserving Line Breaks When Converting HTML to Plain Text with Jsoup

When converting HTML content to plaintext, it's essential to maintain line breaks for readability. By default, Jsoup's text() method strips line breaks, potentially disrupting the formatting of your output. Fortunately, there's a workaround that leverages the getWholeText() method to preserve line breaks.

Using getWholeText() to Preserve Line Breaks

The getWholeText() method in Jsoup returns the entire text content of a document, including line breaks. To utilize this method, you can follow these steps:

1. Parse your HTML string using Jsoup:

   <code class="java">Document doc = Jsoup.parse(htmlString);</code>

2. Iterate over the document's elements and extract text:

   <code class="java">for (Element element : doc.getAllElements()) {
       text += element.getWholeText().trim();
       if (element.tagName().equals("br")) {
           text += "\n";
       }
   }</code>

By adding a line break after each
tag, you can ensure that line breaks are preserved in your output text.

Advanced Solution: br2nl() Method

The above solution works effectively but can be improved by incorporating the following utility method:

<code class="java">public static String br2nl(String html) {
    if (html == null) {
        return html;
    }
    Document document = Jsoup.parse(html);
    document.outputSettings(new Document.OutputSettings().prettyPrint(false));
    document.select("br").append("\n");
    document.select("p").prepend("\n\n");
    String s = document.html().replaceAll("\\n", "\n");
    return Jsoup.clean(s, "", Whitelist.none(), new Document.OutputSettings().prettyPrint(false));
}</code>

This method not only preserves line breaks from
and

tags but also ensures that newlines in the original HTML are retained. It does this by selectively prepending and appending line breaks to HTML elements and then performing a regex substitution to replace the escaped line breaks with actual newlines.

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