Cleans rich text so that HTML is cleanly removed, p and br tags are reduced to new lines and some special characters are replaced with the text equivelents.

cleanhtml.lua

local t = [[ your html ]]

-- list of strings to replace (the order is important to avoid conflicts)
local cleaner = {
	{ "&", "&" }, -- decode ampersands
	{ "—", "-" }, -- em dash
	{ "’", "'" }, -- right single quote
	{ "“", "\"" }, -- left double quote
	{ "”", "\"" }, -- right double quote
	{ "–", "-" }, -- en dash
	{ " ", " " }, -- non-breaking space
	{ "<br ?/?>", "\n" }, -- all <br> tags whether terminated or not (<br> <br/> <br />) become new lines
	{ "</p>", "\n" }, -- ends of paragraphs become new lines
	{ "(%b<>)", "" }, -- all other html elements are completely removed (must be done last)
	{ "\r", "\n" }, -- return carriage become new lines
	{ "[\n\n]+", "\n" }, -- reduce all multiple new lines with a single new line
	{ "^\n*", "" }, -- trim new lines from the start...
	{ "\n*$", "" }, -- ... and end
}

-- clean html from the string
for i=1, #cleaner do
	local cleans = cleaner[i]
	t = string.gsub( t, cleans[1], cleans[2] )
end

print("["..t.."]") -- print the string with end indicators

Flawless, many thanks.

Super! That's what I need!