From: Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality <ihatespam@...>
Date: 2007-11-19T22:00:03+09:00
Subject: to_plain_text() in hpricot doesn't do what you'd think it'd do...

    You'd think that the to_plain_text() method would conver the HTML to 
whatever text would be rendered by a browser.  That means stripping all the 
extraneous whitespace, converting <br> and <p> tags to having appropriate 
carriage returns, etc...  Not only does it not do that but links exhibit 
exceptionally weird behaviour.  They append the URL of the link in square 
brackets.  What's up with that?
    Can anyone explain the motivation behind the to_plain_text() method in 
hpricot?  Does anyone agree with my opinion on what it should do?
    Thank you...