Question

I am trying to strip XML tags from a document using Python, a language I am a novice in. Here is my first attempt using regex, whixh was really a hope-for-the-best idea.

mfile = file("somefile.xml","w")

for line in mfile:
    re.sub('<./>',"",line) #trying to match elements between < and />

That failed miserably. I would like to know how it should be done with regex.

Secondly, I googled and found: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/440481-strips-xmlhtml-tags-from-string/

which seems to work. But I would like to know is there a simpler way to get rid of all xml tags? Maybe using ElementTree?

Answer 1

Please, note, that usually it is not normal to do it by regular expressions. See Jeremiah answer.

Try this:

import re

text = re.sub('<[^<]+>', "", open("/path/to/file").read())
with open("/path/to/file", "w") as f:
    f.write(text)