Parser may exist already for this kind of thing, but why don't you just parse it yourself? Read in the text one character at a time. When you get to a ">" you see what comes up next. If it's "<" you do nothing, otherwise you keep it and store it (capture it?) Basically, if there's text between ">" and "<" you extract it. Otherwise, you keep going.
Hope this helped,
-blazed
Edit: you might also want to do something to ignore whitespace-only text in case someone goes <br> <br>Something</br></br> ...