I came across this library textract for extracting text from various formats. I was interested to use this for extracting text from html files. Here is what I did to get it to install on my machine. The installation outlines some steps that you need to perform. These steps can be found at the following url: http://textract.readthedocs.org/en/latest/installation.html I wanted to install it for python 3.4 on ubuntu 14.04, but it seemed to only support python 2.