Strip HTML tags from a string using regular expressions

Paschal asked me to find a simple solution for stripping HTML tags from a given string using Regular expressions.

The solution is quite simple:

1. Retrieve all the HTML tags using this pattern: <(.|\n)*?>

2. Replace them with an empty string and return the result

Here's a C# function that does this:

private string StripHTML(string htmlString)

{

//This pattern Matches everything found inside html tags;

//(.|\n) - > Look for any character or a new line

// *?  -> 0 or more occurences, and make a non-greedy search meaning

//That the match will stop at the first available '>' it sees, and not at the last one

//(if it stopped at the last one we could have overlooked

//nested HTML tags inside a bigger HTML tag..)

// Thanks to Oisin and Hugh Brown for helping on this one...

string pattern = @"<(.|\n)*?>";

return  Regex.Replace(htmlString,pattern,string.Empty);

}

Or with just one line of code:

string stripped = Regex.Replace(textBox1.Text,@"<(.|\n)*?>",string.Empty);

Comments

[m_sobo]

wow this works great! THX

[Kevin Johnston]

Hi Roy,

If you were gay I'd marry you man... you are so awesome looking!

Kev

[Anh Dung]

Thank you very much!

[Grady Persell]

Works for my purposes! Thank you for sharing.

[Imputo]

Hello,

nice and simple, save me a lot of time.

Thanks !!!

Darko

[DineshKumar]

Thank u very much.. this thread is very useful

[Charlie]

Thanks a lot, you saved me!

[Yogi]

Will this work if the text contains < or >.I guess it will strip these also.What can be done to consider this scenario?

[DRead]

@Yogi: If your characters are not escaped as then you would need to use a far more complex regular expression. There is one such example here: http://haacked.com/archive/2004/10/25/usingregularexpressionstomatchhtml.aspx

[Seba]

Great. It's works in javascript: str.replace(/<(.|\n)*?>/g,'')

thanks Roy!!