private ArrayList<String> extractTags(String tags) {

        // probably more efficent ways to do this.
        //
        // whitespace = re.compile('\s')

        tags = tags.replaceAll("\\s", "");
        String tagArray[] = tags.split(",");

        // let's clean it up, removing the empty string and removing dups
        ArrayList<String> cleaned = new ArrayList<String>();
        for (String tag : tagArray) {
            if (!tag.equals("") && !cleaned.contains(tag)) {
                cleaned.add(tag);
            }
        }

        return cleaned;
    }