Table formatting not useful

Question

Table formatting not useful

MarcGrol opened this issue 7 years ago · comments

I am using html2text in my unit-testing to extract the "essence" from html formatted emails.
As you know, html-formatted emails use a specific html dialect that use (deeply nested) tables intensively.
Since the introduction of the new table-formatting html2text become completely useless for me.
For now I will vendor the former version, but do you have any ideas how to go on?
I can for example add a feature-toggle to disable/enable formatted tables?

J. Elliot Taylor · Answer 1 · Wed May 24 2017 07:07:59 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Oh no! I'm sorry to hear that we've inadvertently broken you. Appreciate you reaching out in such a timely manner!

I'm confident we can find a way to accommodate all our collective needs in this case.

My first impulse is to add some config options so that we can control the rendering behavior. Perhaps it'd look like an optional extra parameter with a flag to disalbe ASCII table rendering.

Does this sound like a reasonable compromise / approach? Any other ideas on how we can best resolve this issue? I'm all ears! :D

Marc Grol · Answer 2 · Wed May 24 2017 15:24:46 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Thanks for your response. Your suggested approach would allow me to keep using the latest and greatest version of html2text.

Mathieu Cornic · Answer 3 · Wed May 24 2017 20:18:56 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Hey @MarcGrol,
I'm the one responsible of breaking your usage :(. I agree with @jaytaylor solution.

In my opinion, I think the default behavior should be the old display. And an option like "PrettyTable" could be enabled.

Moreover, this kind of options could be used for example to replace the character used for converting the lists "* vs -"

@MarcGrol do you plan to make the PR or should I do it ?

J. Elliot Taylor · Answer 4 · Thu May 25 2017 23:34:44 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

@matcornic I'm working on a PR for this, may have something later today or if I don't get to it before Friday I'll have some time this weekend.

Once I open the PR I'll select you both as reviewers so we can ensure it's good for everyone :)

Thanks!

cc @MarcGrol

J. Elliot Taylor · Answer 5 · Sat May 27 2017 07:32:50 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

@matcornic @MarcGrol GH currently not letting me request reviews from you, so if you're able please try / check it out and let me know what you think!

Cheers,
Jay

Mathieu Cornic · Answer 6 · Tue May 30 2017 01:32:07 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

@jaytaylor looks fine to me, i commented the PR :)

Marc Grol · Answer 7 · Wed May 31 2017 02:00:28 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Sorry for the delay.
@jaytaylor @matcornic: Reviewed and tested this specific version against my software and everything works fine again.
I am glad I can keep using the latest and greatest version of the html2text package.
Thanks a lot for creating the PR.