Python code to remove HTML tags from a string

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 doesnt prevent you from using external libraries, so I recommend the first solution.

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

Python has several XML modules built in. The simplest one for the case that you already have a string with the full HTML is xml.etree, which works (somewhat) similarly to the lxml example you mention:

def remove_tags(text):
    return .join(xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring(text).itertext())

Python code to remove HTML tags from a string

Note that this isnt perfect, since if you had something like, say, <a title=>> it would break. However, its about the closest youd get in non-library Python without a really complex function:

import re

TAG_RE = re.compile(r<[^>]+>)

def remove_tags(text):
    return TAG_RE.sub(, text)

However, as lvc mentions xml.etree is available in the Python Standard Library, so you could probably just adapt it to serve like your existing lxml version:

def remove_tags(text):
    return .join(xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring(text).itertext())