Html to ansi colored terminal text

Sergey picture Sergey · Mar 24, 2011 · Viewed 7.5k times · Source

I am under Linux and I want to fetch an html page from the web and then output it on terminal. I found out that html2text essentially does the job, but it converts my html to a plain text whereas I would better convert it into ansi colored text in the spirit of ls --color=auto. Any ideas?

Answer

davrieb picture davrieb · Mar 28, 2011

The elinks browser can do that. Other text browsers such as lynx or w3m might be able to do that as well.

elinks -dump -dump-color-mode 1 http://example.com/

the above example provides a text version of http://example.com/ using 16 colors. The output format can be customized further depending on need.

The -dump option enables the dump mode, which just prints the whole page as text, with the link destinations printed out in a kind of "email-style".

-dump-color-mode 1 enables the coloring of the output using the 16 basic terminal colors. Depending on the value and the capabilities of the terminal emulator this can be up to ~16 million (True Color). The values are documented in elinks.conf(5).

The colors used for output can be configured as well, which is documented in elinks.conf(5) as well.