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 printing a line in an HTML file, I'm trying to find a way to only show the contents of each HTML element and not the formatting itself. If it finds '<a href="whatever.com">some text</a>', it will only print 'some text', '<b>hello</b>' prints 'hello', etc. How would one go about doing this?

Answer 1

You can write your own function:

def StripTags(text):
     finished = 0
     while not finished:
         finished = 1
         start = text.find("<")
         if start >= 0:
             stop = text[start:].find(">")
             if stop >= 0:
                 text = text[:start] + text[start+stop+1:]
                 finished = 0
     return text

Answer 2

This is a quick fix and can be even more optimized but it will work fine. This code will replace all non empty tags with "" and strips all html tags form a given input text .You can run it using ./file.py input output

    #!/usr/bin/python
import sys

def replace(strng,replaceText):
    rpl = 0
    while rpl > -1:
        rpl = strng.find(replaceText)
        if rpl != -1:
            strng = strng[0:rpl] + strng[rpl + len(replaceText):]
    return strng


lessThanPos = -1
count = 0
listOf = []

try:
    #write File
    writeto = open(sys.argv[2],'w')

    #read file and store it in list
    f = open(sys.argv[1],'r')
    for readLine in f.readlines():
        listOf.append(readLine)         
    f.close()

    #remove all tags  
    for line in listOf:
        count = 0;  
        lessThanPos = -1  
        lineTemp =  line

            for char in lineTemp:

            if char == "<":
                lessThanPos = count
            if char == ">":
                if lessThanPos > -1:
                    if line[lessThanPos:count + 1] != '<>':
                        lineTemp = replace(lineTemp,line[lessThanPos:count + 1])
                        lessThanPos = -1
            count = count + 1
        lineTemp = lineTemp.replace("&lt","<")
        lineTemp = lineTemp.replace("&gt",">")                  
        writeto.write(lineTemp)  
    writeto.close() 
    print "Write To --- >" , sys.argv[2]
except:
    print "Help: invalid arguments or exception"
    print "Usage : ",sys.argv[0]," inputfile outputfile"

Answer 3

There's a simple way to this:

def remove_html_markup(s):
    tag = False
    quote = False
    out = ""

    for c in s:
            if c == '<' and not quote:
                tag = True
            elif c == '>' and not quote:
                tag = False
            elif (c == '"' or c == "'") and tag:
                quote = not quote
            elif not tag:
                out = out + c

    return out

The idea is explained here: http://youtu.be/2tu9LTDujbw

You can see it working here: http://youtu.be/HPkNPcYed9M?t=35s

PS - If you're interested in the class(about smart debugging with python) I give you a link: http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs259/CourseRev/1. It's free!

You're welcome! :)

Answer 4

If you want to strip all HTML tags the easiest way I found is using BeautifulSoup:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup  # Or from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

def stripHtmlTags(htmlTxt):
    if htmlTxt is None:
            return None
        else:
            return ''.join(BeautifulSoup(htmlTxt).findAll(text=True)) 

I tried the code of the accepted answer but I was getting "RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded", which didn't happen with the above block of code.

Answer 5

For one project, I needed so strip HTML, but also css and js. Thus, I made a variation of Eloffs answer:

class MLStripper(HTMLParser):
    def __init__(self):
        self.reset()
        self.strict = False
        self.convert_charrefs= True
        self.fed = []
        self.css = False
    def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
        if tag == "style" or tag=="script":
            self.css = True
    def handle_endtag(self, tag):
        if tag=="style" or tag=="script":
            self.css=False
    def handle_data(self, d):
        if not self.css:
            self.fed.append(d)
    def get_data(self):
        return ''.join(self.fed)

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

Answer 6

You can use either a different HTML parser (like lxml, or Beautiful Soup) -- one that offers functions to extract just text. Or, you can run a regex on your line string that strips out the tags. See http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/regex/ for more.