Link text is not included in cleaned text

[smilledge]

For example the following markup;

<a href="...">This is a link</a> and this is some text.

Will produce the following;

 and this is some text.

It would be nice to have the ability to extract the text from the <a> tag, and add it the the cleaned text. So we get a result link this;

This is a link and this is some text.

Alternatively, the ability to whitelist some HTML tags would be very useful.