How Can I Efficiently Remove HTML Tags from Strings in Python?

Stripping HTML Tags from Strings in Python

In Python, there are various scenarios where you may need to remove HTML tags from a string to extract its content. Let's explore a solution to this problem.

Suppose you retrieve HTML content using the mechanize library, as shown in the example snippet. Each line of the content contains HTML tags and text. To extract only the text, we need to strip the tags.

One option is to use a custom function to perform this task. The function strip_tags utilizes the HTMLParser class to create a parser that processes HTML content. The parser extracts only the data within the tags and accumulates it in a StringIO object.

Here's the code snippet for Python 3:

from io import StringIO
from html.parser import HTMLParser

class MLStripper(HTMLParser):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()
        self.reset()
        self.strict = False
        self.convert_charrefs= True
        self.text = StringIO()
    def handle_data(self, d):
        self.text.write(d)
    def get_data(self):
        return self.text.getvalue()

def strip_tags(html):
    s = MLStripper()
    s.feed(html)
    return s.get_data()

For Python 2, use the following code:

from HTMLParser import HTMLParser
from StringIO import StringIO

class MLStripper(HTMLParser):
    def __init__(self):
        self.reset()
        self.text = StringIO()
    def handle_data(self, d):
        self.text.write(d)
    def get_data(self):
        return self.text.getvalue()

def strip_tags(html):
    s = MLStripper()
    s.feed(html)
    return s.get_data()

By passing the HTML content to this function, you can effectively remove the tags and retain only the text content.

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