I’m working on a project where I need to take HTML content and insert it into a Google Doc while preserving the formatting. Let’s say I have HTML like this:
I want this to show up in the Google Doc as Welcomeeveryone with the bold and italic formatting applied correctly.
Is there a way to do this with Google Apps Script? I’ve been looking for a solution that can parse HTML tags and convert them to the appropriate text formatting in the document. Maybe there’s a built-in method or a library that handles this kind of HTML to Google Docs conversion?
Any suggestions on how to approach this would be really helpful!
I encountered a similar challenge while developing a content migration tool. The Google Docs API lacks a built-in HTML-to-formatting converter, but you can use regex to parse HTML tags and apply rich text formatting with DocumentApp methods. My approach involved extracting text and mapping HTML tags to appropriate formatting, such as using setFontWeight() for bold text and setItalic() for italics. Keep in mind that nested tags can complicate the process, so I recommend processing the HTML in smaller chunks and formatting specific character ranges with getRange(). It’s a bit cumbersome, but it effectively handles many common HTML tags.
Try HtmlService.createHtmlOutput() with a custom parser function. I built something like this last year - create a mapping object that links HTML tags to Apps Script formatting methods. Walk through the HTML string character by character and keep a stack of active formatting states. Hit an opening tag? Push the formatting onto the stack and apply it to the text that follows. Hit a closing tag? Pop from the stack. This handles nested formatting way better than processing everything at once. I used DocumentApp.openById() with insertText(), then applied formatting ranges afterward. Worked great for complex nested tags.
skip the regex parsing - there’s an easier approach. use appendText() with editAsText() to insert plain text first, then format specific ranges afterward. strip out the html tags, add your text, then apply setBold() and setItalic() to the character positions where those tags were. works great for basic stuff like strong and em tags.