pip install markdownify

Convert some HTML to Markdown:

from markdownify import markdownify as md
md('<b>Yay</b> <a href="http://github.com">GitHub</a>')  # > '**Yay** [GitHub](http://github.com)'

Specify tags to exclude:

from markdownify import markdownify as md
md('<b>Yay</b> <a href="http://github.com">GitHub</a>', strip=['a'])  # > '**Yay** GitHub'

...or specify the tags you want to include:

from markdownify import markdownify as md
md('<b>Yay</b> <a href="http://github.com">GitHub</a>', convert=['b'])  # > '**Yay** GitHub'

Markdownify supports the following options:

strip

A list of tags to strip. This option can't be used with the convert option.

convert

A list of tags to convert. This option can't be used with the strip option.

autolinks

A boolean indicating whether the "automatic link" style should be used when a a tag's contents match its href. Defaults to True.

default_title

A boolean to enable setting the title of a link to its href, if no title is given. Defaults to False.

heading_style

Defines how headings should be converted. Accepted values are ATX, ATX_CLOSED, SETEXT, and UNDERLINED (which is an alias for SETEXT). Defaults to UNDERLINED.

bullets

An iterable (string, list, or tuple) of bullet styles to be used. If the iterable only contains one item, it will be used regardless of how deeply lists are nested. Otherwise, the bullet will alternate based on nesting level. Defaults to '*+-'.

strong_em_symbol

In markdown, both * and _ are used to encode strong or emphasized texts. Either of these symbols can be chosen by the options ASTERISK (default) or UNDERSCORE respectively.

sub_symbol, sup_symbol

Define the chars that surround <sub> and <sup> text. Defaults to an empty string, because this is non-standard behavior. Could be something like ~ and ^ to result in ~sub~ and ^sup^.

newline_style

Defines the style of marking linebreaks (<br>) in markdown. The default value SPACES of this option will adopt the usual two spaces and a newline, while BACKSLASH will convert a linebreak to \\n (a backslash and a newline). While the latter convention is non-standard, it is commonly preferred and supported by a lot of interpreters.

code_language

Defines the language that should be assumed for all <pre> sections. Useful, if all code on a page is in the same programming language and should be annotated with ```python or similar. Defaults to '' (empty string) and can be any string.

code_language_callback

When the HTML code contains pre tags that in some way provide the code language, for example as class, this callback can be used to extract the language from the tag and prefix it to the converted pre tag. The callback gets one single argument, an BeautifylSoup object, and returns a string containing the code language, or None. An example to use the class name as code language could be:

def callback(el):
    return el['class'][0] if el.has_attr('class') else None

Defaults to None.

escape_asterisks

If set to False, do not escape * to \* in text. Defaults to True.

escape_underscores

If set to False, do not escape _ to \_ in text. Defaults to True.

escape_misc

If set to False, do not escape miscellaneous punctuation characters that sometimes have Markdown significance in text. Defaults to True.

keep_inline_images_in

Images are converted to their alt-text when the images are located inside headlines or table cells. If some inline images should be converted to markdown images instead, this option can be set to a list of parent tags that should be allowed to contain inline images, for example ['td']. Defaults to an empty list.

wrap, wrap_width

If wrap is set to True, all text paragraphs are wrapped at wrap_width characters. Defaults to False and 80. Use with newline_style=BACKSLASH to keep line breaks in paragraphs.

Options may be specified as kwargs to the markdownify function, or as a nested Options class in MarkdownConverter subclasses.

from markdownify import MarkdownConverter

# Create shorthand method for conversion
def md(soup, **options):
    return MarkdownConverter(**options).convert_soup(soup)

If you have a special usecase that calls for a special conversion, you can always inherit from MarkdownConverter and override the method you want to change. The function that handles a HTML tag named abc is called convert_abc(self, el, text, convert_as_inline) and returns a string containing the converted HTML tag. The MarkdownConverter object will handle the conversion based on the function names:

from markdownify import MarkdownConverter

class ImageBlockConverter(MarkdownConverter):
    """
    Create a custom MarkdownConverter that adds two newlines after an image
    """
    def convert_img(self, el, text, convert_as_inline):
        return super().convert_img(el, text, convert_as_inline) + '\n\n'

# Create shorthand method for conversion
def md(html, **options):
    return ImageBlockConverter(**options).convert(html)

from markdownify import MarkdownConverter

class IgnoreParagraphsConverter(MarkdownConverter):
    """
    Create a custom MarkdownConverter that ignores paragraphs
    """
    def convert_p(self, el, text, convert_as_inline):
        return ''

# Create shorthand method for conversion
def md(html, **options):
    return IgnoreParagraphsConverter(**options).convert(html)

Use markdownify example.html > example.md or pipe input from stdin (cat example.html | markdownify > example.md). Call markdownify -h to see all available options. They are the same as listed above and take the same arguments.

To run tests and the linter run pip install tox once, then tox.