unhtml: Peeling away the layers

Last week I ran across three gold-star-winner programs in a matter of days; this week I seem to have run aground on one-shot command-line tools, clients or application frameworks.

No matter. It takes all kinds. Here’s unhtml, and you can probably guess as to its goal.

unhtml is one of probably two or three (or four or five …) html-strippers that I’ve seen since the start of this silly little site, and while it’s not the most elegant or flexible, it might be the oldest.

The man page for unhtml has a date of 1998, and if that’s its inception date, then it has done well to survive this long.

Of course, it probably has Debian to thank for that — I looked briefly for an original home page, but didn’t find anything that satisfied me. And considering that the AUR page for unhtml simply pulls the source code from Debian, it might be that it’s only around now because of the way Debian preserves code.

I can’t speak very highly of unhtml no matter its age; its only flag is a call for the version, and even the man page is exceedingly terse. You have the flexibility to pipe code through unhtml or to aim it at a file, but that’s about it.

All the same, I think it does the job, and with the exception of a few oddball tags like you see above, it did what it promised. Given the option, I might rely on something else though. Personally, that is.