diff --git a/plugins/util/http.py b/plugins/util/http.py
index 8a426fd..17ffe5e 100755
--- a/plugins/util/http.py
+++ b/plugins/util/http.py
@@ -11,6 +11,9 @@ from urllib import quote, quote_plus as _quote_plus
 from lxml import etree, html
 from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
 
+from HTMLParser import HTMLParser
+import htmlentitydefs
+
 # used in plugins that import this
 from urllib2 import URLError, HTTPError
 
@@ -27,6 +30,26 @@ ua_chrome = 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, ' \
 jar = cookielib.CookieJar()
 
 
+class HTMLTextExtractor(HTMLParser):
+    def __init__(self):
+        HTMLParser.__init__(self)
+        self.result = [ ]
+
+    def handle_data(self, d):
+        self.result.append(d)
+
+    def handle_charref(self, number):
+        codepoint = int(number[1:], 16) if number[0] in (u'x', u'X') else int(number)
+        self.result.append(unichr(codepoint))
+
+    def handle_entityref(self, name):
+        codepoint = htmlentitydefs.name2codepoint[name]
+        self.result.append(unichr(codepoint))
+
+    def get_text(self):
+        return u''.join(self.result)
+
+
 def get(*args, **kwargs):
     return open(*args, **kwargs).read()
 
@@ -111,3 +134,9 @@ def unescape(s):
     if not s.strip():
         return s
     return html.fromstring(s).text_content()
+
+
+def strip_html(html):
+    s = HTMLTextExtractor()
+    s.feed(html)
+    return s.get_text()