Reformatting message text

[jrgriggs01]

After downloading my meade4504telescopes eGroup messages, I exported to an Access .mdb file.  I wanted to try to created an Access report, but the data in the message field contains html tags as well as break characters that show up as special characters.

How can I reformat this as standard text?

[Wilson Logan]

Hi James,

HTML is notoriously hard to get rid of. I searched the net for an HTML to Text convertor & found only other people looking for the same thing.

I don't see why its so hard but I guess there must be some insurmountable difficulty involved because I have yet to find one.

What I do is, I copy the text from the Digest mode to Notepad in Windows, it does a good job of losing the HTML.

Cheers,
 
Wilson.

[jrgriggs01]

Thanks for your prompt reply, Wilson.

Actually, I was hoping to be able to get rid of the html code in the .mdb file so that I could generate my own custom reports.

There's gotta be a way ....

I suppose I could write a script that would parse all of the data and remove all known html tags and parameters ... yuck.

Jim

[Wilson Logan]

Well, you know, I considered that myself. I write the odd Qbasic program & I'm thinking "How hard can it be?" and then I'm thinking, I can't find an app on the net to do this so there must be some very serious technical problem involved.

The only thing that comes to mind is... parsers. They must know what to do with HTML to get text out. Hmmm, parsers are like drivers... fiendish hard & a labour of love. The fact that on-one else has cracked this scares me off trying it.    

Don't let me stop you though :)

Cheers,

Wilson.