Removing HTML tags from a unicode string in Python

Question

I have a strong that I scraped from an XML file and It contains some HTML formatting tags

(<b>, <i>, etc)

Is there a quick and easy way to remove all of these tags from the text?

I tried

str = str.replace("<b>","")

and applied it several times to other tags, but that doesn't work

Answer 1

Using lxml.html:

lxml.html.fromstring(s).text_content()

This strips all tags and converts all entities to their corresponding characters.

Answer 2

Answer depends on your exact needs. You might have a look at regular expressions. But I would advise you to use http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ if you want to clean up bad xml or html.