How do I export indentation to a txt file from google docs?

Question

I want to convert a google docs document to a text file preserving indentation. When I copy and paste, or export indentation seems to be lost.

Work around

I'm looking into exporting to html and then getting the indentation from this - but this feels a bit silly. It looks like css classes in the html export indicate indentation. This probably isn't at all stable though.

<p class="c1 c3 c2">

This snippet works for my use case:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import argparse
import re

import lxml.etree
from lxml.etree import tostring

PARSER = argparse.ArgumentParser()
PARSER.add_argument("html")
args = PARSER.parse_args()

with open(args.html) as stream:
    t = lxml.etree.HTML(stream.read())

for p in t.xpath("//p"):
    classes = p.attrib["class"].split()
    (text,) = p.xpath("./descendant-or-self::*/text()")
    indent = 0
    for x in classes:
        class_indent = int(re.match(r"c(\d+)", x).group(1))
        indent = max(indent, class_indent)
    print((indent - 1) * "\t" + text)