Currently I have code that does something like this:
soup = BeautifulSoup(value)
for tag in soup.findAll(True):
if tag.name not in VALID_TAGS:
tag.extract()
soup.renderContents()
Except I don't want to throw away the contents inside the invalid tag. How do I get rid of the tag but keep the contents inside when calling soup.renderContents()?
Current versions of the BeautifulSoup library have an undocumented method on Tag objects called replaceWithChildren(). So, you could do something like this:
html = "<p>Good, <b>bad</b>, and <i>ug<b>l</b><u>y</u></i></p>"
invalid_tags = ['b', 'i', 'u']
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
for tag in invalid_tags:
for match in soup.findAll(tag):
match.replaceWithChildren()
print soup
Looks like it behaves like you want it to and is fairly straightforward code (although it does make a few passes through the DOM, but this could easily be optimized.)
The strategy I used is to replace a tag with its contents if they are of type NavigableString and if they aren't, then recurse into them and replace their contents with NavigableString, etc. Try this:
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup, NavigableString
def strip_tags(html, invalid_tags):
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
for tag in soup.findAll(True):
if tag.name in invalid_tags:
s = ""
for c in tag.contents:
if not isinstance(c, NavigableString):
c = strip_tags(unicode(c), invalid_tags)
s += unicode(c)
tag.replaceWith(s)
return soup
html = "<p>Good, <b>bad</b>, and <i>ug<b>l</b><u>y</u></i></p>"
invalid_tags = ['b', 'i', 'u']
print strip_tags(html, invalid_tags)
The result is:
<p>Good, bad, and ugly</p>
I gave this same answer on another question. It seems to come up a lot.
unicode strings on each call.
Although this has already been mentoned by other people in the comments, I thought I'd post a full answer showing how to do it with Mozilla's Bleach. Personally, I think this is a lot nicer than using BeautifulSoup for this.
import bleach
html = "<b>Bad</b> <strong>Ugly</strong> <script>Evil()</script>"
clean = bleach.clean(html, tags=[], strip=True)
print clean # Should print: "Bad Ugly Evil()"
I have a simpler solution but I don't know if there's a drawback to it.
UPDATE: there's a drawback, see Jesse Dhillon's comment. Also, another solution will be to use Mozilla's Bleach instead of BeautifulSoup.
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
VALID_TAGS = ['div', 'p']
value = '<div><p>Hello <b>there</b> my friend!</p></div>'
soup = BeautifulSoup(value)
for tag in soup.findAll(True):
if tag.name not in VALID_TAGS:
tag.replaceWith(tag.renderContents())
print soup.renderContents()
This will also print <div><p>Hello there my friend!</p></div> as desired.
<p> untouched in case VALID_TAGS = 'b'
depth == 1. Try your code with the example in my answer above.html, I get the same error as xralf (I'm using version 3.0.8.1)? The slacy's solution works for me but the drawback is that's not possible to specify only the valid tags (and maybe the speed).you can use soup.text
.text removes all tags and concatenate all text.
You'll presumably have to move tag's children to be children of tag's parent before you remove the tag -- is that what you mean?
If so, then, while inserting the contents in the right place is tricky, something like this should work:
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
VALID_TAGS = 'div', 'p'
value = '<div><p>Hello <b>there</b> my friend!</p></div>'
soup = BeautifulSoup(value)
for tag in soup.findAll(True):
if tag.name not in VALID_TAGS:
for i, x in enumerate(tag.parent.contents):
if x == tag: break
else:
print "Can't find", tag, "in", tag.parent
continue
for r in reversed(tag.contents):
tag.parent.insert(i, r)
tag.extract()
print soup.renderContents()
with the example value, this prints <div><p>Hello there my friend!</p></div> as desired.
Use unwrap.
Unwrap will remove one of multiple occurrence of the tag and still keep the contents.
Example:
>> soup = BeautifulSoup('Hi. This is a <nobr> nobr </nobr>')
>> soup
<html><body><p>Hi. This is a <nobr> nobr </nobr></p></body></html>
>> soup.nobr.unwrap
<nobr></nobr>
>> soup
>> <html><body><p>Hi. This is a nobr </p></body></html>
None of the proposed answered seemed to work with BeautifulSoup for me. Here's a version that works with BeautifulSoup 3.2.1, and also inserts a space when joining content from different tags instead of concatenating words.
def strip_tags(html, whitelist=[]):
"""
Strip all HTML tags except for a list of whitelisted tags.
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
for tag in soup.findAll(True):
if tag.name not in whitelist:
tag.append(' ')
tag.replaceWithChildren()
result = unicode(soup)
# Clean up any repeated spaces and spaces like this: '<a>test </a> '
result = re.sub(' +', ' ', result)
result = re.sub(r' (<[^>]*> )', r'\1', result)
return result.strip()
Example:
strip_tags('<h2><a><span>test</span></a> testing</h2><p>again</p>', ['a'])
# result: u'<a>test</a> testing again'
Here is the better solution without any hassles and boilerplate code to filter out the tags keeping the content.Lets say you want to remove any children tags within the parent tag and just want to keep the contents/text then,you can simply do:
for p_tags in div_tags.find_all("p"):
print(p_tags.get_text())
That's it and you can be free with all the br or i b tags within the parent tags and get the clean text.
Here is a python 3 friendly version of this function:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, NavigableString
invalidTags = ['br','b','font']
def stripTags(html, invalid_tags):
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "lxml")
for tag in soup.findAll(True):
if tag.name in invalid_tags:
s = ""
for c in tag.contents:
if not isinstance(c, NavigableString):
c = stripTags(str(c), invalid_tags)
s += str(c)
tag.replaceWith(s)
return soup
This is an old question, but just to say of a better ways to do it. First of all, BeautifulSoup 3* is no longer being developed, so you should rather use BeautifulSoup 4*, so called bs4.
Also, lxml has just function that you need: Cleaner class has attribute remove_tags, which you can set to tags that will be removed while their content getting pulled up into the parent tag.
I initially liked Jesse Dhillon's answer a lot. However, I kept running into issues with the recursive calls due to recalling of the parser in BS4. I tried to change the level of recursion, but I kept running into problems with that too.
Then I looked into applying Bishwas Mishra's answer. Due to changes in BS4, I had to modify his code a bit, and I finally was able to develop a piece of code that would remove tags and maintain content.
I hope this helps some others.
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
html = "<p>Good, <b>bad</b>, and <i>ug<b>l</b><u>y</u></i></p>"
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html5lib")
for c in ["html", "head", "body", "b", "i", "u"]:
while soup.find(c):
exec(f"soup.{c}.unwrap()")
print(soup)
NOTE: It is necessary to add "html", "head", and "body" to the invalid tags list, because BS4 will add those into your html text if they were not originally there, and I did not want them for my specific case.
The output I got from the above code was ...
<p>Good, bad, and ugly</p>
