Remove all javascript tags and style tags from html with python and the lxml module

Question

Below is an example to do what you want. For an HTML document, Cleaner is a better general solution to the problem than using strip_elements, because in cases like this you want to strip out more than just the <script> tag; you also want to get rid of things like onclick=function() attributes on other tags.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import lxml
from lxml.html.clean import Cleaner

cleaner = Cleaner()
cleaner.javascript = True # This is True because we want to activate the javascript filter
cleaner.style = True      # This is True because we want to activate the styles & stylesheet filter

print("WITH JAVASCRIPT & STYLES")
print(lxml.html.tostring(lxml.html.parse('http://www.google.com')))
print("WITHOUT JAVASCRIPT & STYLES")
print(lxml.html.tostring(cleaner.clean_html(lxml.html.parse('http://www.google.com'))))

You can get a list of the options you can set in the lxml.html.clean.Cleaner documentation; some options you can just set to True or False (the default) and others take a list like:

cleaner.kill_tags = ['a', 'h1']
cleaner.remove_tags = ['p']

Note that the difference between kill vs remove:

remove_tags:
  A list of tags to remove. Only the tags will be removed, their content will get pulled up into the parent tag.
kill_tags:
  A list of tags to kill. Killing also removes the tag's content, i.e. the whole subtree, not just the tag itself.
allow_tags:
  A list of tags to include (default include all).

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