Newby: How do I strip HTML tags?

[netvegetable]

I'm mucking around with cgi, and I'm trying to work out a way to strip the 
html tags of a string. e.g, I want to convert this...

><font size = 12><b><big>Really Big String</big></b></font>

to this this ...

>Really Big String

... and store it as a value.

I worked out a crude, but effective way of doing it (see code below), but I 
can't escape the feeling there must be a built in way of doing it more. If 
nothing else, I'm sure somebody who knows their regular expressions could 
neaten it up (please?).

def strip_html_tags(it):
	left = it[:(len(it)/2)]
	right = it[(len(it)/2):]
	final = left[left.rfind('>')+1:] + right[:right.find('<')]
	return final

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