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'm parsing Github readmes and I find that the following really works well:

import re
import lxml.html

def strip_markdown(x):
    links_sub = re.sub(r'\[(.+)\]\([^\)]+\)', r'\1', x)
    bold_sub = re.sub(r'\*\*([^*]+)\*\*', r'\1', links_sub)
    emph_sub = re.sub(r'\*([^*]+)\*', r'\1', bold_sub)
    return emph_sub

def strip_html(x):
    return lxml.html.fromstring(x).text_content() if x else ''

And then

readme = """

            sky is a web scraping framework, implemented with the latest python versions in mind (3.4+). 
            It uses the asynchronous `asyncio` framework, as well as many popular modules 
            and extensions.

            Most importantly, it aims for **next generation** web crawling where machine intelligence 
            is used to speed up the development/maintainance/reliability of crawling.

            It mainly does this by considering the user to be interested in content 
            from *domains*, not just a collection of *single pages*
            ([templating approach](#templating-approach))."""

strip_markdown(strip_html(readme))

Removes all markdown and html correctly.