Inscriptis -- A Python-based HTML to text conversion library optimized for knowledge extraction from the Web

Inscriptis provides a library, command line client and Web service for converting HTML to plain text. Its development has been triggered by the need to obtain accurate text representations for knowledge extraction tasks that preserve the spatial alignment of text without drawing upon heavyweight, browser-based solutions such as Selenium. In contrast to existing software packages such as HTML2text, jusText and Lynx, Inscriptis (i) provides a layout-aware conversion of HTML that more closely resembles the rendering obtained from standard Web browsers and, therefore, better preserves the spatial arrangement of text elements. Inscriptis excels in terms of conversion quality, since it correctly converts complex HTML constructs such as nested tables and also interprets a subset of HTML attributes that determine the text alignment. In addition, it (ii) supports annotation rules, i.e., user-provided mappings that allow for annotating the extracted text based on structural and semantic information encoded in HTML tags and attributes used for controlling structure and layout in the original HTML document. These unique features ensure that downstream knowledge extraction components can operate on accurate text representations, and may even use information on the semantics and structure of the original HTML document, if annotation support has been enabled.