Html2Text.Net

Just fast HTML -> Text.

Lightweight, hand rolled, high-performance HTML to plain text conversion for .NET.

This library focuses on extracting the text content of a page as quickly and predictably as possible. No attempt is undertaken to interpret layout, CSS, visibility, or rendering rules, other than applying some basic formatting for readability to table headings and table data rows to make them look nice in plain text.

Goals

• High performance: designed for low allocations and fast throughput.
• Text extraction only: get the words from the page/document.
• No dependencies: Lightweight, not an embedded browser engine. No dependencies other than .NET itself.

Out of scope

• Respecting CSS, computed styles, display:none, or visibility.
• Pixel-accurate layout, whitespace mirroring, or browser-equivalent rendering.
• Executing JavaScript or loading remote resources.

Target frameworks

• .NET 8+

Install

When I've published to NuGet (coming soon!), you will be able to:

• dotnet add package Html2Text

Or, for now, download or submodule the repo and reference the project directly.

Usage

Simple as possible:

using Html2Text;

string html = "<h1>Hello</h1><p>World</p>";

string text = Html2Text.Convert(html);

// Hello
//
// World

Output rules (high-level)

• Text nodes are emitted in document order.
• Basic block separation is preserved (e.g., paragraphs/headings insert newlines).
• Whitespace is normalized to produce readable plain text.

Pipeline

HTML document -> Lexer (tokens) -> Parser (AST nodes) -> Renderer (string text)

Basic formatting behaviour is defined in Html2Text\Rendering.

Performance notes

• Designed for converting many documents quickly (batch processing, indexing, search pipelines).
• Avoids DOM dependencies.
• uses a lightweight, hand rolled lexer/parser/renderer pipeline.

Benchmarks are in Html2Text.PerfTests.

Projects in this repository

• Html2Text/: core library
• Html2Text.Example/: small example app
• Html2Text.Tests/: unit tests
• Html2Text.RegressionTests/: regression/acceptance tests
• Html2Text.PerfTests/: performance benchmarking console app
• Samples/: sample HTML files used during development and automated regression testing

Build & test commands

Build with:

dotnet build

Run unit tests and regression tests:

dotnet test

Run performance benchmarks:

dotnet run -c Release --project Html2Text.PerfTests

License

MPL-2.0 see LICENSE.txt