Question

I am looking for a python module that will help me get rid of HTML tags but keep the text values. I tried BeautifulSoup before and I couldn’t figure out how to do this simple task. I tried searching for Python modules that could do this but they all seem to be dependent on other libraries which does not work well on AppEngine.

Below is a sample code from Ruby’s sanitize library and that’s what I am after in Python:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sanitize'

html = '<b><a href="http://foo.com/">foo</a></b><img src="http://foo.com/bar.jpg" />'

Sanitize.clean(html) # => 'foo'

Thanks for your suggestions.

-e

Answer 1

>>> import BeautifulSoup
>>> html = '<b><a href="http://foo.com/">foo</a></b><img src="http://foo.com/bar.jpg" />'
>>> bs = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(html)  
>>> bs.findAll(text=True)
[u'foo']

This gives you a list of (Unicode) strings. If you want to turn it into a single string, use ''.join(thatlist).