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*"What alchemy is this?"* you mutter. *"I can see why you'd convert [Markdown to HTML](https://github.com/thephpleague/commonmark),"* you continue, already labouring the question somewhat, *"but why go the other way?"*
Typically you would convert HTML to Markdown if:
1. You have an existing HTML document that needs to be edited by people with good taste.
2. You want to store new content in HTML format but edit it as Markdown.
3. You want to convert HTML email to plain text email.
4. You know a guy who's been converting HTML to Markdown for years, and now he can speak Elvish. You'd quite like to be able to speak Elvish.
5. You just really like Markdown.
### How to use it
Require the library by issuing this command:
```bash
composer require league/html-to-markdown
```
Add `require 'vendor/autoload.php';` to the top of your script.
Next, create a new HtmlConverter instance, passing in your valid HTML code to its `convert()` function:
```php
use League\HTMLToMarkdown\HtmlConverter;
$converter = new HtmlConverter();
$html = "<h3>Quick, to the Batpoles!</h3>";
$markdown = $converter->convert($html);
```
The `$markdown` variable now contains the Markdown version of your HTML as a string:
```php
echo $markdown; // ==> ### Quick, to the Batpoles!
```
The included `demo` directory contains an HTML->Markdown conversion form to try out.
### Conversion options
By default, HTML To Markdown preserves HTML tags without Markdown equivalents, like `<span>` and `<div>`.
To strip HTML tags that don't have a Markdown equivalent while preserving the content inside them, set `strip_tags` to true, like this:
```php
$converter = new HtmlConverter(array('strip_tags' => true));
$html = '<span>Turnips!</span>';
$markdown = $converter->convert($html); // $markdown now contains "Turnips!"
By default bold tags are converted using the asterisk syntax, and italic tags are converted using the underlined syntax. Change these by using the `bold_style` and `italic_style` options.
By default, `br` tags are converted to two spaces followed by a newline character as per [traditional Markdown](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#p). Set `hard_break` to `true` to omit the two spaces, as per GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM).
- Any reported [open issues here](https://github.com/thephpleague/html-to-markdown/issues?state=open).
[Report your issue or request a feature here.](https://github.com/thephpleague/html-to-markdown/issues/new) Issues with patches or failing tests are especially welcome.
### Style notes
- Setext (underlined) headers are the default for H1 and H2. If you prefer the ATX style for H1 and H2 (# Header 1 and ## Header 2), set `header_style` to 'atx' in the options array when you instantiate the object:
`$converter = new HtmlConverter(array('header_style'=>'atx'));`
Headers of H3 priority and lower always use atx style.
- Links and images are referenced inline. Footnote references (where image src and anchor href attributes are listed in the footnotes) are not used.
- Blockquotes aren't line wrapped – it makes the converted Markdown easier to edit.
### Dependencies
HTML To Markdown requires PHP's [xml](http://www.php.net/manual/en/xml.installation.php), [lib-xml](http://www.php.net/manual/en/libxml.installation.php), and [dom](http://www.php.net/manual/en/dom.installation.php) extensions, all of which are enabled by default on most distributions.
Errors such as "Fatal error: Class 'DOMDocument' not found" on distributions such as CentOS that disable PHP's xml extension can be resolved by installing php-xml.
### Contributors
Many thanks to all [contributors](https://github.com/thephpleague/html-to-markdown/graphs/contributors) so far. Further improvements and feature suggestions are very welcome.
### How it works
HTML To Markdown creates a DOMDocument from the supplied HTML, walks through the tree, and converts each node to a text node containing the equivalent markdown, starting from the most deeply nested node and working inwards towards the root node.
### To-do
- Support for nested lists and lists inside blockquotes.
- Offer an option to preserve tags as HTML if they contain attributes that can't be represented with Markdown (e.g. `style`).