Strips XML/HTML Tags from string (Python recipe) by Micah Cochran

ActiveState Code (http://code.activestate.com/recipes/440481/)

Why so long? How about this (not much tested, but you get the idea, I suppose. This is using the unittest module with your own sample text.

class TagStrippingTest(unittest.TestCase):
    def test(self):
        "Test replacing HTML-like tags from text."
        inpText = "Keep this Text <remove><me /> KEEP </remove> 123"
        expText = "Keep this Text  KEEP  123"
        t = re.sub("< */? *\w+ */?\ *>", "", inpText)   ### here's the meat!
        self.assertEqual(t, expText)

This could have serious problems with HTML comments. What I use to strip HTML tags is the follow pair of regular expressions (replace the square brackets in the regex with angle brackets... I had a bear of a time trying to get it to post correctly with angle brackets). This doesn't work on all web pages I've tried and definitely doesn't implement the correct SGML comment syntax (which is very subtle, see the acid2 test for details), but it gets me by in a pinch.

import re
HTMLtag = re.compile('[.*?]')      # Matches HTML tags
HTMLcom = re.compile('[!--.*?--]') # Matches HTML comments
resultstr = HTMLtag.sub('', HTMLcom.sub('', sourcestr))

Why reinvent the wheel?

>>> test_text = "Keep this Text  KEEP  123"
>>> import HTMLParser
>>> class MLStripper(HTMLParser.HTMLParser):
...     def __init__(self):
...         self.reset()
...         self.fed = []
...     def handle_data(self, d):
...         self.fed.append(d)
...     def get_fed_data(self):
...         return ''.join(self.fed)
...
>>> x = MLStripper()
>>> x.feed(test_text)
>>> x.get_fed_data()
'Keep this Text  KEEP  123'
>>>

Using HTMLParser rather than sgmllib is preferable because it doesn't die on unmatched tags, etc. Also, using this particular module rather than a custom re-based parser will allow you to build applications that do things other than strip HTML/XML/SGML/...

nice but inefficient. Mybe to use HTMLParser s the best solution, but if you want to not use it, I think I know a better way to do this. Your code has a performance of O(n^2) (never acces members of a list by their position, use iterators!), following code has a performance of O(n) (and it shows you the beauty of python):

def stripTags(s):
# this list is neccesarry because chk() would otherwise not know
# that intag in stripTags() is ment, and not a new intag variable in chk().
    intag = [False]

    def chk(c):
        if intag[0]:
            intag[0] = (c != '>')
            return False
        elif c == '<':
            intag[0] = True
            return False
        return True

    return ''.join(c for c in s if chk(c))

Gah with html escapes. Here's that test with the proper portions of tags escaped.

>>> test_text = "Keep this Text <remove><me /> KEEP </remove> 123"
>>> import HTMLParser
>>> class MLStripper(HTMLParser.HTMLParser):
...     def __init__(self):
...         self.reset()
...         self.fed = []
...     def handle_data(self, d):
...         self.fed.append(d)
...     def get_fed_data(self):
...         return ''.join(self.fed)
...
>>> x = MLStripper()
>>> x.feed(test_text)
>>> x.get_fed_data()
'Keep this Text  KEEP  123'
>>>

K.I.S. simple and legible:

import re
def StripHTML (html):
    reg = re.compile(r'simple and legible:

<pre>
import re
def StripHTML (html):
    reg = re.compile(r'

</pre>