Python code to remove HTML tags from a string

Question

I have a text like this:

text = """<div>
<h1>Title</h1>
<p>A long text........ </p>
<a href=""> a link </a>
</div>"""

using pure Python, with no external module I want to have this:

>>> print remove_tags(text)
Title A long text..... a link

I know I can do it using lxml.html.fromstring(text).text_content() but I need to achieve the same in pure Python using builtin or std library for 2.6+

How can I do that?

Answer 1

Using a regex

Using a regex, you can clean everything inside <> :

import re
# as per recommendation from @freylis, compile once only
CLEANR = re.compile('<.*?>') 

def cleanhtml(raw_html):
  cleantext = re.sub(CLEANR, '', raw_html)
  return cleantext

Some HTML texts can also contain entities that are not enclosed in brackets, such as '&nsbm'. If that is the case, then you might want to write the regex as

CLEANR = re.compile('<.*?>|&([a-z0-9]+|#[0-9]{1,6}|#x[0-9a-f]{1,6});')

This link contains more details on this.

Using BeautifulSoup

You could also use BeautifulSoup additional package to find out all the raw text.

You will need to explicitly set a parser when calling BeautifulSoup I recommend "lxml" as mentioned in alternative answers (much more robust than the default one (html.parser) (i.e. available without additional install).

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
cleantext = BeautifulSoup(raw_html, "lxml").text

But it doesn't prevent you from using external libraries, so I recommend the first solution.

EDIT: To use lxml you need to pip install lxml.