Parsing only <option selected> from a <select> list.

[thegoatherder]

The goal
My HTML contains <select> form controls. The parser extracts the text for every <option> in the menu. I want it to only extract the control as it's displayed - i.e. the <option selected>

Is there a configuration option that supports this? I can't find one on the docs.

Example:

<div>You have selected:</div>
<select>
   <option>A</option>
   <option>B</option>
   <option selected>C</option>
</select>

Currently this outputs as:

You have selected: A B C

Desired output

You have selected: C

Best attempt
I can try to preprocess the HTML in a DOM parser to remove the other options from the menu prior to handing it to html-to-text

[KillyMXI]

I'd suggest to create a custom formatter for select tags.
In a formatter you have access to children nodes, you can inspect them and pick whatever you need instead of calling the walk function.

Start from this Readme section.
elem is a DOM Element as parsed by htmlparser2. You can use astexplorer to see how it represents tags and attributes of interest.

Of built-in formatters, list and table formatters handle all the children tags on their own, although they are a lot more complex than the formatter for select is going to be.

I haven't implemented formatters for form tags myself yet because it seems rather rare use-case for html-to-text for the amount of code to support. But with requests like this coming I may reprioritize it. So thanks for asking.

[KillyMXI]

Alternatively, you can skip all option tags and only display option[selected], thanks to selectors support.

There is no :not() selector support (yet), so it will look like this:

{
  selectors: [
    { selector: 'option', format: 'skip'  },
    { selector: 'option[selected]', format: 'inline' }
  ]
}

[thegoatherder]

Excellent! Thanks, I’ll give this a go on Monday.