Question

I have a string containing text and HTML. I want to remove or otherwise disable some HTML tags, such as <script>, while allowing others, so that I can render it on a web page safely. I have a list of allowed tags, how can I process the string to remove any other tags?

Answer 1

Here’s a simple solution using BeautifulSoup:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup  VALID_TAGS = ['strong', 'em', 'p', 'ul', 'li', 'br']  def sanitize_html(value):      soup = BeautifulSoup(value)      for tag in soup.findAll(True):         if tag.name not in VALID_TAGS:             tag.hidden = True      return soup.renderContents() 

If you want to remove the contents of the invalid tags as well, substitute tag.extract() for tag.hidden.

You might also look into using lxml and Tidy.