Is anyone aware of a way to convert a rich text string to plain text such that it doesn't contain all the formatting html markup?

Here is the situation:

Users enter notes into a note field.  Upon saving the form, any new notes are copies from the notes field (rich text) to a multi line field (for use in a downstream system).

The problem is that when the notes are copied to the multi line field, the multi line field now contains all sort of rich text html markup for the formatting.

Example:

<p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255)"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 22px">Hi Dayana!</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255)"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 22px"><br /></span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255)"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 22px">Congratulations on your engagement!</span></font></p>

I am kind of an amateur so I apologize if I am missing something obvious.