How to remove html tags in python

If you often deal with web content, you may need to crawl web pages and extract text content from them. However, tags and style information in HTML code can make text processing quite difficult. In this case, the Python programming language provides some useful functions and libraries to remove HTML tags, allowing you to process and use text more easily.

Python provides two commonly used libraries to remove HTML tags: re and BeautifulSoup. Here, we will learn how to remove HTML tags using these two libraries respectively.

Using the re library

Python's re (regular expression) library has powerful string processing capabilities. We can use some methods of this library to remove HTML tags. Specifically, we can use the re.sub() function to replace HTML tags. Let's look at an example:

import re

def remove_tags(text):
    TAG_RE = re.compile(r']+>')
    return TAG_RE.sub('', text)

html = '<title>Test</title><h1 id="Parse-me">Parse me!</h1>'
print(remove_tags(html))

Output:

Test Parse me!

In the above code, the re.compile() function is used to create a regular expression object using '1 >'Regular expression matches HTML tags. We then pass this regular expression object as a parameter to the re.sub() function, which replaces all matching tags with empty strings. Finally, we call the function with the text with the HTML tags removed.

Although using the re library to process simple HTML text may be sufficient, if you are processing complex HTML text, when you start to consider processing CSS styles and JavaScript scripts, you will find that It becomes more difficult to deal with. In this case you can use BeautifulSoup library.

Using the BeautifulSoup library

The BeautifulSoup library makes processing HTML text easier, and it is more flexible than the re library. BeautifulSoup helps you parse HTML text and allows you to select specific elements such as tags, classes, etc. You can use this to remove all tags and then extract the text content.

Here is an example:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

def remove_tags(text):
    soup = BeautifulSoup(text, 'html.parser')
    return soup.get_text()

html = '<title>Test</title><h1 id="Parse-me">Parse me!</h1>'
print(remove_tags(html))

Output:

Test Parse me!

In the above code, we pass the HTML text to the BeautifulSoup() function for parsing. Then, use the soup.get_text() method to extract the text content while ignoring the HTML tags.

Summary

Whether you use the re library or the BeautifulSoup library, Python provides many methods to remove HTML tags. If you are dealing with simple HTML text, use the re library. For more complex HTML text, use the BeautifulSoup library, which will make processing much easier. Whichever method you choose, you should be familiar with regular expressions and understand the syntax of your chosen library.

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