convert xhtml back to html

[Tim Arnold]

hi, I've got lots of xhtml pages that need to be fed to MS HTML Workshop to 
create  CHM files. That application really hates xhtml, so I need to convert 
self-ending tags (e.g. <br />) to plain html (e.g. <br>).

Seems simple enough, but I'm having some trouble with it. regexps trip up 
because I also have to take into account 'img', 'meta', 'link' tags, not 
just the simple 'br' and 'hr' tags. Well, maybe there's a simple way to do 
that with regexps, but my simpleminded <img[^(/>)]+/> doesn't work. I'm not 
enough of a regexp pro to figure out that lookahead stuff.

I'm not sure where to start now; I looked at BeautifulSoup and 
BeautifulStoneSoup, but I can't see how to modify the actual tag.

thanks,
--Tim Arnold