Regular Expression to remove html tags from a string in Python

I am fetching my resut from a RSS feed using following code:

try:
    desc = item.xpath('description')[0].text
    if date is not None:
        desc =date +"\n"+"\n"+desc
except:
    desc = None

But sometimes the description contains html tags inside RSS feed as below:

This is开发者_运维知识库 samle text

< img src="http://imageURL" alt="" />

While displaying the content I do not want any HTML tags to be displayed on page. Is there any regular expression to remove the HTML tags.

---

Try:

pattern = re.compile(u'<\/?\w+\s*[^>]*?\/?>', re.DOTALL | re.MULTILINE | re.IGNORECASE | re.UNICODE)
text = pattern.sub(u" ", text)

---

The quick and dirty way:

def remove_html_tags(text):
    pattern = re.compile(r'<.*?>')
    return pattern.sub('', text)

But for a more robust solution, I'd recommend looking into Beautiful Soup.

---

There's a simple way to this without using regex. It's a robust solution:

def remove_html_markup(s):
    tag = False
    quote = False
    out = ""

    for c in s:
            if c == '<' and not quote:
                tag = True
            elif c == '>' and not quote:
                tag = False
            elif (c == '"' or c == "'") and tag:
                quote = not quote
            elif not tag:
                out = out + c

    return out

The idea is explained here: http://youtu.be/2tu9LTDujbw

You can see it working here: http://youtu.be/HPkNPcYed9M?t=35s

PS - If you're interested in the class(about smart debugging with python) I give you a link: http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs259/CourseRev/1. It's free!

You're welcome! :)