I needed to strip the tags from some HTML that was embedded in an XML feed so I could display a short summary from the full content in a UITableView. Rather than go through the effort of parsing HTML on the iPhone (as I already parsed the XML file) I built this simple method from some half-finished snippets I found. It has worked in all of the cases I have needed, but your mileage may vary. It is at least a working method (which cannot be said about most of the other examples). It works on the iPhone and in standard OS X coding.

- (NSString *)flattenHTML:(NSString *)html {

    NSScanner *theScanner;
    NSString *text = nil;

    theScanner = [NSScanner scannerWithString:html];

    while ([theScanner isAtEnd] == NO) {

        // find start of tag
        [theScanner scanUpToString:@"<" intoString:NULL] ; 

        // find end of tag
        [theScanner scanUpToString:@">" intoString:&text] ;

        // replace the found tag with a space
        //(you can filter multi-spaces out later if you wish)
        html = [html stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:
                           [ NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@>", text]
                     withString:@" "];

    } // while //
    
    return html;

}