Question

Is there an easy way to use the Python library html5lib to convert something like this:

<p>Hello World. Greetings from <strong>Mars.</strong></p>

to

Hello World. Greetings from Mars.

Answer 1

With lxml as the parser backend:

import html5lib

body = "<p>Hello World. Greetings from <strong>Mars.</strong></p>"
doc = html5lib.parse(body, treebuilder="lxml")
print doc.text_content()

To be honest, this is actually cheating, as it is equivalent to the following (only the relevant parts are changed):

from lxml import html
doc = html.fromstring(body)
print doc.text_content()

If you really want the html5lib parsing engine:

from lxml.html import html5parser
doc = html5parser.fromstring(body)
print doc.xpath("string()")