etreehtml is a small, copy & pasteable Python library to parse HTML code into xml.etree.ElementTree.
etreehtml has no dependencies. If dependencies are an option, you should really use lxml instead of etreehtml. It requires Python 2.5 or newer, including Python 3.x with and without 2to3.
To install it, go ahead and copy the content of etreehtml.py and paste it above your code. Alternatively, youc an of course download the file, put it in your application's module search path (for example in the directory your other code resides in), and import it with import etreehtml.
doc = parseHTML('<html><p>Cont<br>ent</p></html>')
text = etree_text(doc.find('//p'))
assert text == 'Content'