For example, many of my more complex packages write to a text file as a form of logging ‘events’. I use this for testing as well as simply to see timeline of ‘things that happen’.
I would like to be able to open/display these files in Lovelace.
As a work around, you can probably get this working relatively quickly with a command_line sensor & a markdown card.
Yeah, I’ve wondered about using a Markdown card but I’m not sure how I’d get the contents into the card?
That’s the easy part. The hard part is getting the data into attributes.
Check out this post, it reads json and converts it to a different object type. You can use something similar to add the contents of your file to data instead.
Ha! I was the OP for that thread!
I’ll have a look at that again but some of my log files get pretty big when I’m testing things so that solution might be a bit unwieldly.
Greetings everybody,
I am as well more than slightly confused, to say the least, about the fact that, despite the abundant spectrum of utilities and toolkits available for the Home Assistant platform, there seems to be no straightforward way to display a simple cleartext file in the Lovelace dashboard. I have been trying to find a solution to this, but so far I have come up empty-handed.
I understand that Lovelace is a powerful tool that allows users to create complex, interactive dashboards, but sometimes all we need is a simple way to display a piece of information in a clear and concise manner. It would be great if there was an easy way to do this without having to resort to custom components or workarounds.
Perhaps I am missing something here, or maybe there is a feature that I am not aware of. If anyone has any suggestions or solutions, I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you in advance for your help!
Have a good run! 
true … i am trying now for one week to get 20 Beaches - that are safe to swim - shown on the Dashboard.
- First thing was simple the scraper – but why do i only can scrape ONE Value ??
- Then i installed the Multiscrape tool … only to fail another time : I am getting data into Attributes that are hidden in a drop down … and this is only working for static sites (Number of beaches changes from day to day).
- next thing on my list … parse via UNIX/htmlq and get a ready Text file into the HA Folder … and now i even can´t get a simple Text File shown on the dashboard.
- running everytime into 255 Character/state error.
When looking for answer i found plenty of people with the same problem …
Shame on HA to fail at such a simple task … 
Scrape can get multiple values.
yeah sorry that was not accurate from me … but anyway - still not solves the problem when needing external data. This could be implemented without any issues … is long wanted … and would add a lot more usability to HA.