Filter out HTML tags and resolve entities in python

Question

Because regular expressions scare me, I\'m trying to find a way to remove all HTML tags and resolve HTML entities from a string in Python.

Answer 1

How about parsing the HTML data and extracting the data with the help of the parser ?

I'd try something like the author described in chapter 8.3 in the Dive Into Python book

Answer 2

You might need something more complicated than a regular expression. Web pages often have angle brackets that aren't part of a tag, like this:

 <div>5 < 7</div>

Stripping the tags with regex will return the string "5 " and treat

 < 7</div>

as a single tag and strip it out.

I suggest looking for already-written code that does this for you. I did a search and found this: http://zesty.ca/python/scrape.html It also can resolve HTML entities.