How to retrieve editor content without html???

Hi all
Am using fckedito to provide my customers a way to enter / edit text at their will...
At the end, I want to retrieve the editor content and save it to a database...
But apparently, the retrieved content is mixed with nasty html tags! I want to avoid this...
I don't want to use client side javascript for this purpose... as suggested in many threads in this forum...
Is there a way to do this programmatically through java?
Your help is very much appreciated. Thanx.
-nat