How do you remove all html tags from text in python?

Using a regex

Using a regex, you can clean everything inside <> :

import re
# as per recommendation from @freylis, compile once only
CLEANR = re.compile('<.*?>') 

def cleanhtml(raw_html):
  cleantext = re.sub(CLEANR, '', raw_html)
  return cleantext

Some HTML texts can also contain entities that are not enclosed in brackets, such as '&nsbm'. If that is the case, then you might want to write the regex as

CLEANR = re.compile('<.*?>|&([a-z0-9]+|#[0-9]{1,6}|#x[0-9a-f]{1,6});')

This link contains more details on this.

Using BeautifulSoup

You could also use BeautifulSoup additional package to find out all the raw text.

You will need to explicitly set a parser when calling BeautifulSoup I recommend "lxml" as mentioned in alternative answers (much more robust than the default one (html.parser) (i.e. available without additional install).

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
cleantext = BeautifulSoup(raw_html, "lxml").text

But it doesn't prevent you from using external libraries, so I recommend the first solution.

EDIT: To use lxml you need to pip install lxml.

Earlier this week I needed to remove some HTML tags from a text, the target string was already saved with HTML tags in the database, and one of the requirement specifies that in some specific page we need to render it as a raw text.

I knew from the beginning that regular expressions could apply for this challenge, but since I am not an expert with regular expressions I looked for some advise in stack overflow and then I found what I actually needed.

Below is the function I have defined:

def remove_html_tags(text):
"""Remove html tags from a string"""
import re
clean = re.compile('<.*?>')
return re.sub(clean, '', text)

So the idea is to build a regular expression which can find all characters “< >” as a first incidence in a text, and after, using the sub function, we can replace all text between those symbols with an empty string.

Lets see this in the shell:

How do you remove all html tags from text in python?

Hope this can help you!

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This tutorial will demonstrate two different methods as to how one can remove html tags from a string such as the one that we retrieved in my previous tutorial on fetching a web page using Python

Method 1

This method will demonstrate a way that we can remove html tags from a string using regex strings. 

import re

TAG_RE = re.compile(r'<[^>]+>')

def remove_tags(text):
    return TAG_RE.sub('', text)

Method 2

This is another method we can use to remove html tags using functionality present in the Python Standard library so there is no need for any imports.

def remove_tags(text):
    ''.join(xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring(text).itertext())

Conclusions

In the coming tutorials we will be learning how to calculate important seo metrics such as keyword density that will allow us to perform important seo analysis of competing sites to try and understand how they have achieved their success.

The methods for tag removal can be found here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9662346/python-code-to-remove-html-tags-from-a-string


Sometimes, when we try to store a string in the database, it gets stored along with the HTML tags. But, certain websites need to render the strings in their raw format without any HTML tags from the database. Thus, in this tutorial, we will learn different methods on how to remove HTML tags from a string in Python.

Remove HTML tags from a string using regex in Python

A regular expression is a combination of characters that are going to represent a search pattern. In the regex module of python, we use the sub() function, which will replace the string that matches with a specified pattern with another string. The code for removing HTML strings from a string using regex is mentioned below.

import re

regex = re.compile(r'<[^>]+>')

def remove_html(string):
    return regex.sub('', string)

text=input("Enter String:")
new_text=remove_html(text)
print(f"Text without html tags: {new_text}")

Output 1:

Enter String:
Welcome to my website
Text without html tags: Welcome to my website

Output 2:

Enter String:

Hello

Text without html tags: Hello

How does the above code work?

  1. Initially, we import the regex module in python named ‘re’
  2. Then we use the re.compile() function of the regex module. The re. compile() method will create a regex pattern object from the regex pattern string provided as an input. This pattern object will use regex functions to search for a matching string in different target strings. The parameter to the function is the pattern to be matched with the input string. ‘<>’, matches opening and closing tags in the string.
  3.  ‘.*’ means zero or more than zero characters. Regex is a greedy method where it tries to match as many repetitions as possible. If this does not work then the entire procedure backtracks. To convert the greedy to non-greedy approach, we make use of the ‘?’ character in the regex string.  It will basically try to match with only a few repetitions and then backtrack if it does not work.
  4. Then we use re.sub() function to replace the matched pattern with a null string.
  5. Finally, we call the function remove_html which removes the HTML tags from the input string.

Remove HTML tags from a string without using the in-built function

The code for removing HTML strings from a string without using an in-built function is mentioned below.

def remove_html(string):
    tags = False
    quote = False
    output = ""

    for ch in string:
            if ch == '<' and not quote:
                tag = True
            elif ch == '>' and not quote:
                tag = False
            elif (ch == '"' or ch == "'") and tag:
                quote = not quote
            elif not tag:
                output = output + ch

    return output

text=input("Enter String:")
new_text=remove_html(text)
print(f"Text without html tags: {new_text}")

Output:

Enter String:
Welcome to my website
Text without html tags: Welcome to my website

How does the above code work?

In the above code, we keep two counters called tag and quote. The tag variable keeps track of tags whereas the quote variable keeps track of single and double quotes in the input string. We use a for loop and iterate over every character of the string. If the character is opening or closing tag then the Tag variable is set to False. If the character is a single or double quote the quote variable is set to False. Else, the character is appended to the output string. Thus, in the output of the above code, the div tags are removed leaving only the raw string.

Remove HTML tags from a string  using the XML module in Python

The code for removing HTML strings from a string without using XML modules is mentioned below. XML is a markup language that is used to store and transport a large amount of data or information. Python has certain in-built modules which can help us to parse the XML documents.XML documents have individual units called elements that are defined under an opening and closing tag(<>). Whatever lies in between the opening and the closing tag is the element’s content. An element can consist of multiple sub-elements called child elements. Using the ElementTree module in python we can easily manipulate these XML documents.

import xml.etree.ElementTree
def remove_html(string):
    return ''.join(xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring(string).itertext())

text=input("Enter String:")
new_text=remove_html(text)
print(f"Text without html tags: {new_text}")

Output:

Enter String:

I love Coding

Text without html tags: I love Coding

How does the above code work?

  1. Initially, we import the xml.etree.ElementTree module in Python
  2. We use formstring() method to convert or parse the string to XML elements. To iterate over each of these XML elements returned by the formstring() function, we make use of the itertext()  function. It will basically iterate over every XML element and return the inner text within that element.
  3. We join the inner text with a null string using the join function and return the final output string.
  4. Finally, we call the remove_html function which removes the HTML tags from the input string.

Thus, we have reached the end of the tutorial on how to remove HTML tags from a string in Python You can use the following links to learn more about regex in python.
Regex In Python: Regular Expression in Python

How do you remove all text tags in Python?

How does the above code work?.
Initially, we import the regex module in python named 're'.
Then we use the re. compile() function of the regex module. ... .
'. *' means zero or more than zero characters. ... .
Then we use re. ... .
Finally, we call the function remove_html which removes the HTML tags from the input string..

How do you remove HTML from text?

Removing HTML Tags from Text.
Press Ctrl+H. ... .
Click the More button, if it is available. ... .
Make sure the Use Wildcards check box is selected..
In the Find What box, enter the following: \([!<]@)\.
In the Replace With box, enter the following: \1..
With the insertion point still in the Replace With box, press Ctrl+I once..

How do I remove HTML tags using BeautifulSoup?

Approach:.
Import bs4 library..
Create an HTML doc..
Parse the content into a BeautifulSoup object..
Iterate over the data to remove the tags from the document using decompose() method..
Use stripped_strings() method to retrieve the tag content..
Print the extracted data..

Is it possible to remove the HTML tags from data?

Strip_tags() is a function that allows you to strip out all HTML and PHP tags from a given string (parameter one), however you can also use parameter two to specify a list of HTML tags you want.

How do you replace HTML tags in Python?

This powerful python tool can also be used to modify html webpages..
Import module..
Scrap data from webpage..
Parse the string scraped to html..
Select tag within which replacement has to be performed..
Add string in place of the existing one using replace_with() function..
Print replaced content..
sub(r'http\S+', '', my_string) . The re. sub() method will remove any URLs from the string by replacing them with empty strings.