Here is an example: >>> s = "<html>Hello</a>world<anytag>ok" >>> matchtags = re.compile(r"<[^>]+>") >>> matchtags.findall(s) ['<html>', '</a>', '<anytag>'] >>> matchtags.sub('',s) 'Helloworldok' I probably shouldn't have shown you that. It may not work for all HTML, and you should probably be looking at something like BeautifulSoup. Matt