Remove XML/HTML tags using a regular expression

I'm sharing my slow journey through the wonders of regular expressions here. Here's something I learned recently: searching some text for all instances of the regular expression

<.*?>

and replacing it with nothing will quickly remove most XML tags. 

(The key item here is the ?, which makes the expression non-greedy. A <.*> would try to grab all text between the first and last angle brackets on a line; the ? makes the expression grab the text up to to the very next angle bracket.)

I used this in emacs with a replace-regexp command, it was like magic...quick and easy.

I haven't tested this exhaustively...maybe someone else can improve it. I noted that when I took a whole file, some tags that extended across lines didn't get removed. But this only applied to some of the meta information at the top of my file.