Python's equivalent to PHP's strip_tags?

There is no such thing in the Python standard library. It's because Python is a general purpose language while PHP started as a Web oriented language.

Nevertheless, you have 3 solutions:

• You are in a hurry: just make your own. re.sub(r'<[^>]*?>', '', value) can be a quick and dirty solution.
• Use a third party library (recommended because more bullet proof) : beautiful soup is a really good one and there is nothing to install, just copy the lib dir and import. Full tuto with beautiful soup.
• Use a framework. Most Web Python devs never code from scratch, they use a framework such as django that does automatically this stuff for you. Full tuto with django.

Using BeautifulSoup

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(htmltext)
''.join([e for e in soup.recursiveChildGenerator() if isinstance(e,unicode)])

You won't find many builtin Python equivalents for builtin PHP HTML functions since Python is more of a general-purpose scripting language than a web development language. For HTML processing, BeautifulSoup is generally recommended.

Python doesn't have one built-in, but there are an ungodly number of implementations.