How to export text from Google Doc as HTML?

Question

I have body of text in a Google Doc containing a large number of links. I need to get the text – and all the links – into my client's CMS.

Unfortunately, it seems Google Docs no longer allows users to export HTML. I've tried "Download as" > "Web page (.html, zipped)" and uploading that file into Text Wrangler to clean it up, but the links are all scrambled – e.g something twitter.com/sree becomes:

<a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/sree&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1465095908840000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHpFpNdY6Hsr5xrZZlF5vCGTGIt6w">Sree Sreenivasan</a>

Rather than go in and re-do all the links manually, is there any way to get the html code I need from the Google Doc?

Answer 1

You can use a regular expression like this in Text Wrangler :

<a href="https://www.google.com/url\?q=(.*)\&amp;sa(.*)">(.*)</a>

and replace by :

<a href="$1">$3</a>

Answer 2

If you want to convert links in Google Docs to HTML, give the gd2md-html add-on a try (full disclosure: I developed this): https://github.com/evbacher/gd2md-html/wiki

You can select a section of text from a Google Doc that includes links, and convert that to HTML. For example this section from a Google Doc:

converts to this relatively clean HTML:

<h2>Markdown syntax, standards information</h2>
<ul>
<li>Basic Markdown syntax from John Gruber, the inventor of Markdown: 
<a href="https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax">https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax</a>
<li>CommonMark standard: <a href="http://commonmark.org/">http://commonmark.org/</a>