Python's equivalent to PHP's strip_tags?

Question

Python\'s equivalent to PHP\'s strip_tags?

http://php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php

Answer 1

from bleach import clean
print clean("<strong>My Text</strong>", tags=[], strip=True, strip_comments=True)

Answer 2

Python doesn't have one built-in, but there are an ungodly number of implementations.

Answer 3

I built one for Python 3 using the HTMLParser class. It is more verbose than PHP's. I called it the HTMLCleaner class, and you can find the source here and you can find examples here.

Answer 4

There is an active state recipe for this,

http://code.activestate.com/recipes/52281/

It's old code so you have to change sgml parser to HTMLparser as mentioned in the comments

Here is the modified code,

import HTMLParser, string

class StrippingParser(HTMLParser.HTMLParser):

    # These are the HTML tags that we will leave intact
    valid_tags = ('b', 'a', 'i', 'br', 'p', 'img')

    from htmlentitydefs import entitydefs # replace entitydefs from sgmllib

    def __init__(self):
        HTMLParser.HTMLParser.__init__(self)
        self.result = ""
        self.endTagList = []

    def handle_data(self, data):
        if data:
            self.result = self.result + data

    def handle_charref(self, name):
        self.result = "%s&#%s;" % (self.result, name)

    def handle_entityref(self, name):
        if self.entitydefs.has_key(name): 
            x = ';'
        else:
            # this breaks unstandard entities that end with ';'
            x = ''
        self.result = "%s&%s%s" % (self.result, name, x)

    def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
        """ Delete all tags except for legal ones """
        if tag in self.valid_tags:       
            self.result = self.result + '<' + tag
            for k, v in attrs:
                if string.lower(k[0:2]) != 'on' and string.lower(v[0:10]) != 'javascript':
                    self.result = '%s %s="%s"' % (self.result, k, v)
            endTag = '</%s>' % tag
            self.endTagList.insert(0,endTag)    
            self.result = self.result + '>'

    def handle_endtag(self, tag):
        if tag in self.valid_tags:
            self.result = "%s</%s>" % (self.result, tag)
            remTag = '</%s>' % tag
            self.endTagList.remove(remTag)

    def cleanup(self):
        """ Append missing closing tags """
        for j in range(len(self.endTagList)):
                self.result = self.result + self.endTagList[j]    


def strip(s):
    """ Strip illegal HTML tags from string s """
    parser = StrippingParser()
    parser.feed(s)
    parser.close()
    parser.cleanup()
    return parser.result

Answer 5

Using BeautifulSoup

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(htmltext)
''.join([e for e in soup.recursiveChildGenerator() if isinstance(e,unicode)])

Answer 6

There is no such thing in the Python standard library. It's because Python is a general purpose language while PHP started as a Web oriented language.

Nevertheless, you have 3 solutions:

• You are in a hurry: just make your own. re.sub(r'<[^>]*?>', '', value) can be a quick and dirty solution.
• Use a third party library (recommended because more bullet proof) : beautiful soup is a really good one and there is nothing to install, just copy the lib dir and import. Full tuto with beautiful soup.
• Use a framework. Most Web Python devs never code from scratch, they use a framework such as django that does automatically this stuff for you. Full tuto with django.