Strip HTML from strings in Python

Question

from mechanize import Browser
br = Browser()
br.open(\'http://somewebpage\')
html = br.response().readlines()
for line in html:
  print line

When p

Answer 1

I haven't thought much about the cases it will miss, but you can do a simple regex:

re.sub('<[^<]+?>', '', text)

For those that don't understand regex, this searches for a string <...>, where the inner content is made of one or more (+) characters that isn't a <. The ? means that it will match the smallest string it can find. For example given <p>Hello</p>, it will match <'p> and </p> separately with the ?. Without it, it will match the entire string <..Hello..>.

If non-tag < appears in html (eg. 2 < 3), it should be written as an escape sequence &... anyway so the ^< may be unnecessary.

Answer 2

You can use BeautifulSoup get_text() feature.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html_str = '''
<td><a href="http://www.fakewebsite.com">Please can you strip me?</a>
<br/><a href="http://www.fakewebsite.com">I am waiting....</a>
</td>
'''
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_str)

print(soup.get_text()) 
#or via attribute of Soup Object: print(soup.text)

It is advisable to explicitly specify the parser, for example as BeautifulSoup(html_str, features="html.parser"), for the output to be reproducible.