As there doesn’t seem to be any built-in function in XLST for stripping tags from strings (e.g., to remove all markup from a piece of HTML-formatted text), people came up with a recursive template-based solution, which has been posted several times on the web (e.g., here). However, I found this approach hard to use when the string to be cleaned from all tags already is stored in a variable or is created by using a xsl:value-of statement. Therefore, I transformed the existing template-based solution into a function-based one, which is a bit shorter and easier to use. Here it is:
<xsl:function name="util:strip-tags">
<xsl:param name="text"/>
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="contains($text, '<')">
<xsl:value-of select="concat(substring-before($text, '<'),
util:strip-tags(substring-after($text, '>')))"/>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<xsl:value-of select="$text"/>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:function>Note: Don’t forget to declare a namespace for this function (called util in the above code).