Python : Correct way to strip <p> and </p> from string?

I want to strip out <p> and </p> from a string (lets say s).

Right now I am doing this :

s.strip('"<p>""</p>"')

I am not really sure if what I am doing is correct, but this has been effective enough with most of the strings that I have used.

Except, I still get the following string : Here goes..</p>

Is there any other effective way to strip? It does not need to fast or efficient. I need something effective that get's the work done.

Test Case

Let's say:

s="<p>Here goes..</p>"

After performing the necessa开发者_开发技巧ry operations on s, print s should give :

Here goes..

If you're dealing with a lot of HTML/XML, you might want to use a parser to easily and safely manipulate it instead of using basic string manipulation functions. I really like BeautifulSoup for this kind of work. It works with invalid markup and has a really elegant API.

In your example, you could use it like this:

>>> soup = BeautifulSoup('<p>hello world</p>')
>>> soup.text
u'hello world'

Assuming you're not trying to sanitise XML/HTML the following will work:

s = s.replace('<p>', '').replace('</p>', '') 

You are trying to strip the whole all characters present in the "<p>""</p>" string from your values. strip treats this value as a set, it'll remove any ", <, p, /, or > from your string.

>>> s = 'Here goes "/p>'
>>> s.strip('"<p>""</p>"')
'Here goes '

So, using strip (and rstrip and lstrip) is only suitable if you want to remove sets of characters, not a multi-character string as a whole.

If you want to remove <p> from the start and </p> from the end, you could use the following:

if s.startswith('<p>'):
     s = s[3:]
if s.endswith('</p>'):
     s = s[:-4]

If you need to remove these from elsewhere in the string, you need to use s.replace:

s.replace('<p>', '').replace('</p>', '')

or you could look into regular expressions.

You could use regex for that, just an import and one line:

>>> import re
>>> s="text<p>text</p>text"
>>> re.sub("</?p>","",s)
'texttexttext'

The reason of split("</p>")'s fail is trying to strip <,/,p or >; not </p>.

s="<p>Here goes..</p>"
s = s.lstrip("<p>")
s = s.rstrip("</p>").strip('.')