You may often need to remove HTML tags from some random text block and just display the raw text content.

For example you may want to just display the text content of a multi-line rich text value using XSL.
But since a multi-line rich text value is internally formatted with html, the html tags will be presented as part of the output.

I have faced this situation many times in SharePoint.
 
As an example, the output you desire might be:

Note: This is a dummy notice.

But instead of the above, you might get something like:

Note: <div>This is a <em>dummy</em> notice.</div>

The method described here is a general technique that you can always use to remove HTML tags from any XSL value.

Add the following XSL template to the end of your stylesheet file:

<xsl:template name="strip-tags">
	<xsl:param name="text"/>
	<xsl:choose>
		<xsl:when test="contains($text, '&lt;')">
			<xsl:value-of select="substring-before($text, '&lt;')"/>
			<xsl:call-template name="strip-tags">
				<xsl:with-param name="text" select="substring-after($text, '&gt;')"/>
			</xsl:call-template>
		</xsl:when>
		<xsl:otherwise>
			<xsl:value-of select="$text"/>
		</xsl:otherwise>
	</xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

Now let’s say the value you need to call is called @Note

Instead of calling it the usual way like this:

<xsl:value-of select="@Note" />

Call it like this instead:

<xsl:call-template name="strip-tags">
   <xsl:with-param name="text" select="@Note"/>
</xsl:call-template>

The HTML tags will be removed.