diff --git a/shared/utils/text.py b/shared/utils/text.py
index 8959e06..2a7bb16 100644
--- a/shared/utils/text.py
+++ b/shared/utils/text.py
@@ -6,8 +6,8 @@ import translitcodec  # provides 'translit/long', used by codecs.encode() # noqa
 from django.conf import settings
 from django.utils.encoding import force_str
 from django.utils.functional import keep_lazy_text
-from django.utils.html import mark_safe
-from django.utils.text import slugify as django_slugify
+from django.utils.html import mark_safe, strip_tags
+from django.utils.text import slugify as django_slugify, normalize_newlines
 from django.utils.translation import gettext_lazy
 
 
@@ -40,6 +40,7 @@ SLUGIFY_FUNCTION = getattr(settings, 'SLUGIFY_FUNCTION', downgrading_slugify)
 slugify = SLUGIFY_FUNCTION
 
 
+@keep_lazy_text
 def html_entities_to_unicode(html_str):
     return html.unescape(html_str)
 
@@ -86,5 +87,31 @@ def slimdown(text):
         return ""
 
 
+@keep_lazy_text
 def strip_links(text):
     return re.sub(r'<a[^>]+>', '', text, flags=re.DOTALL).replace('</a>', '')
+
+
+COLLAPSE_WHITESPACE_RE = re.compile(r"\s+")
+
+
+@keep_lazy_text
+def collapse_whitespace(text):
+    return COLLAPSE_WHITESPACE_RE.sub(" ", text).strip()
+
+
+@keep_lazy_text
+def html_to_text(text):
+    print(text)
+    rv = collapse_whitespace(strip_tags(html_entities_to_unicode(str(text))))
+    print(rv)
+    return rv
+
+
+try:
+    from html_sanitizer.django import get_sanitizer
+
+    def sanitized_html(html, config_name='default'):
+        return get_sanitizer(config_name).sanitize(html)
+except ImportError:
+    pass