Script to convert WordPress posts to plain text files. Works with Python 3.x and strips out HTML.

wxr2txt.py

#!/usr/bin/env python3

"""This script converts WXR file to a number of plain text files.

WXR stands for "WordPress eXtended RSS", which basically is just a
regular XML file. This script extracts entries from the WXR file into
plain text files. Output format: article name prefixed by date for
posts, article name for pages.

Usage: wxr2txt.py filename [-o output_dir]
"""

import os
import re
import sys
from xml.etree import ElementTree
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

NAMESPACES = {
		'content': 'http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/',
		'wp': 'http://wordpress.org/export/1.2/',
}
USAGE_STRING = "Usage: wxr2txt.py filename [-o output_dir]"

def main(argv):
    filename, output_dir = _parse_and_validate_output(argv)

    try:
        data = ElementTree.parse(filename).getroot()
    except ElementTree.ParseError:
        _error("Invalid input file format. Can not parse the input.")
    page_counter, post_counter = 0, 0
    for post in data.find('channel').findall('item'):
        post_type = post.find('wp:post_type', namespaces=NAMESPACES).text
        if post_type not in ('post', 'page'):
            continue
        content = post.find('content:encoded', namespaces=NAMESPACES).text
        date = post.find('wp:post_date', namespaces=NAMESPACES).text
        title = post.find('title').text
        date = date.split(' ')[0].replace('-', '')
        title = re.sub(r'[_]+', '_', re.sub(r'[^a-z0-9+]', '_', title.lower()))
        if post_type == 'post':
            post_filename = date + '_' + title + '.txt'
            post_counter += 1
        else:
            post_filename = title + '.txt'
            page_counter += 1
        content = BeautifulSoup(content, "html.parser").get_text()
        with open(os.path.join(output_dir, post_filename), 'w') as post_file:
            post_file.write(content)
        post_counter += 1
    print("Saved {} posts and {} pages in directory '{}'.".format(
            post_counter, page_counter, output_dir))

def _parse_and_validate_output(argv):
    if len(argv) not in (2, 4):
        _error("Wrong number of arguments.")
    filename = argv[1]
    if not os.path.isfile(filename):
        _error("Input file does not exist (or not enough permissions).")
    if len(argv) == 4 and argv[2] == '-o':
        output_dir = argv[3]
    else:
        output_dir = os.getcwd()
    if not os.path.isdir(output_dir):
        _error("Output directory does not exist (or not enough permissions).")
    return filename, output_dir

def _error(text):
	print (text)
	print (USAGE_STRING)
	sys.exit(1)

if __name__ == "__main__":
	main(sys.argv)

Based on https://gist.github.com/ruslanosipov/b748a138389db2cda1e8.
Updated to work with modern Python and added the use of BeautifulSoup's HTML parser to extract only the text of the posts.