Question

I want to strip all html tags from a string except some I specify.
If I call the constructor with default values everything works fine:

>>> cleaner = lxml.html.clean.Cleaner()
>>> cleaner.clean_html('''<i>italic</i><script>alert('');</script>''')
'<span><i>italic</i></span>'

But when I try to specify some tags, things doesn’t work anymore:

>>> allowed_tags = ['i','s']
>>> cleaner = lxml.html.clean.Cleaner(remove_unknown_tags=False,allow_tags=allowed_tags)
>>> cleaner.clean_html('''<i>italic</i><s>strike</s>''')
'<span></span>'

So what am i doing wrong?

Answer 1

As a workaround, you can add span and div tags to allowed_tags.

UPD

lxml.html.Cleaner tries to convert string to html tree by calling fromstring, which checks if document have some root node, and adds it if necessary. So you need to allow span and div tags