strip_tags

# File actionpack/lib/action_view/helpers/text_helper.rb, line 216
      def strip_tags(html)
        if html.index("<")
          text = ""
          tokenizer = HTML::Tokenizer.new(html)

          while token = tokenizer.next
            node = HTML::Node.parse(nil, 0, 0, token, false)
            # result is only the content of any Text nodes
            text << node.to_s if node.class == HTML::Text  
          end
          # strip any comments, and if they have a newline at the end (ie. line with
          # only a comment) strip that too
          text.gsub(/<!--(.*?)-->[\n]?/m, "") 
        else
          html # already plain text
        end 
      end