I had a similar situation , when i wanted to convert the rich text to pure html and pull it out via a view.
my solution was the following:
- In the rich-text field properties, i turned on the option: save as MIME and HTML.
- created a hidden textfield .
- On save, replaced the value of the hidden textfield with the one from the rich-text field.
- In the view i referred to hidden textfield to take out the data.
In your case, if you do not want the rich text formatting, you can probably filter out tags using the implode and explode functions.
Good luck,
Meco