html5strip

Strip empty leading and trailing tags from HTML fragments

Some examples

html5strip removes unused <br> tags:

<div><br>Hello, world!<br></div> => <div>Hello, world!</div>

Likewise, it can handle other empty tags, too:

<div><p> </p>Hello, world!<p> </p></div> => <div>Hello, world!</div>

While preserving any "inside" tags:

<div>Hello,<br>world!<div> => <div>Hello,<br>world!</div>

Simply put in any (X)HTML fragment:

<p></p>Hello, world! => Hello, world!

Or arbitrarily complex empty tag structures:

<div><div><div><br><p> </p></div></div>Hello, world!</div> => <div>Hello, world!</div>

html5strip is based on the excellent lxml and html5lib libraries and hence repairs even broken HTML:

<div>Hello, world!<br> => <div>Hello, world!</div>

Dependencies

pip install lxml html5lib

Usage

from html5strip import HTML5Strip
HTML5Strip.strip("<div><br>Hello, world!<br></div>")  # <div>Hello, world!</div>

Limitations

html5strip is not aware of any tag semantics, it only looks at whether a tag contains text or not. Hence, images, forms, SVGs, scripts and many other elements that might carry some content, but no text, might be stripped.