Remove HTML tags from a String

If the user enters <b>hey!</b>, do you want to display <b>hey!</b> or hey!? If the first, escape less-thans, and html-encode ampersands (and optionally quotes) and you're fine. A modification to your code to implement the second option would be:

replaceAll("\\<[^>]*>","")

but you will run into issues if the user enters something malformed, like <bhey!</b>.

You can also check out JTidy which will parse "dirty" html input, and should give you a way to remove the tags, keeping the text.

The problem with trying to strip html is that browsers have very lenient parsers, more lenient than any library you can find will, so even if you do your best to strip all tags (using the replace method above, a DOM library, or JTidy), you will still need to make sure to encode any remaining HTML special characters to keep your output safe.

Another way is to use javax.swing.text.html.HTMLEditorKit to extract the text.

import java.io.*;
import javax.swing.text.html.*;
import javax.swing.text.html.parser.*;

public class Html2Text extends HTMLEditorKit.ParserCallback {
    StringBuffer s;

    public Html2Text() {
    }

    public void parse(Reader in) throws IOException {
        s = new StringBuffer();
        ParserDelegator delegator = new ParserDelegator();
        // the third parameter is TRUE to ignore charset directive
        delegator.parse(in, this, Boolean.TRUE);
    }

    public void handleText(char[] text, int pos) {
        s.append(text);
    }

    public String getText() {
        return s.toString();
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            // the HTML to convert
            FileReader in = new FileReader("java-new.html");
            Html2Text parser = new Html2Text();
            parser.parse(in);
            in.close();
            System.out.println(parser.getText());
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

ref : Remove HTML tags from a file to extract only the TEXT

HTML Escaping is really hard to do right- I'd definitely suggest using library code to do this, as it's a lot more subtle than you'd think. Check out Apache's StringEscapeUtils for a pretty good library for handling this in Java.

You can simply use the Android's default HTML filter

    public String htmlToStringFilter(String textToFilter){

    return Html.fromHtml(textToFilter).toString();

    }

The above method will return the HTML filtered string for your input.

You might want to replace <br/> and </p> tags with newlines before stripping the HTML to prevent it becoming an illegible mess as Tim suggests.

The only way I can think of removing HTML tags but leaving non-HTML between angle brackets would be check against a list of HTML tags. Something along these lines...

replaceAll("\\<[\s]*tag[^>]*>","")

Then HTML-decode special characters such as &. The result should not be considered to be sanitized.

Here is one more variant of how to replace all(HTML Tags | HTML Entities | Empty Space in HTML content)

content.replaceAll("(<.*?>)|(&.*?;)|([ ]{2,})", ""); where content is a String.

It sounds like you want to go from HTML to plain text.
If that is the case look at www.htmlparser.org. Here is an example that strips all the tags out from the html file found at a URL.
It makes use of org.htmlparser.beans.StringBean.

static public String getUrlContentsAsText(String url) {
    String content = "";
    StringBean stringBean = new StringBean();
    stringBean.setURL(url);
    content = stringBean.getStrings();
    return content;
}

classeString.replaceAll("\\<(/?[^\\>]+)\\>", "\\ ").replaceAll("\\s+", " ").trim() 

Sometimes the html string come from xml with such &lt. When using Jsoup we need parse it and then clean it.

Document doc = Jsoup.parse(htmlstrl);
Whitelist wl = Whitelist.none();
String plain = Jsoup.clean(doc.text(), wl);

While only using Jsoup.parse(htmlstrl).text() can't remove tags.

Try this for javascript:

const strippedString = htmlString.replace(/(<([^>]+)>)/gi, "");
console.log(strippedString);

You can use this method to remove the HTML tags from the String,

public static String stripHtmlTags(String html) {

    return html.replaceAll("<.*?>", "");

}

I know it is been a while since this question as been asked, but I found another solution, this is what worked for me:

Pattern REMOVE_TAGS = Pattern.compile("<.+?>");
    Source source= new Source(htmlAsString);
 Matcher m = REMOVE_TAGS.matcher(sourceStep.getTextExtractor().toString());
                        String clearedHtml= m.replaceAll("");

Worth noting that if you're trying to accomplish this in a Service Stack project, it's already a built-in string extension

using ServiceStack.Text;
// ...
"The <b>quick</b> brown <p> fox </p> jumps over the lazy dog".StripHtml();

I often find that I only need to strip out comments and script elements. This has worked reliably for me for 15 years and can easily be extended to handle any element name in HTML or XML:

// delete all comments
response = response.replaceAll("<!--[^>]*-->", "");
// delete all script elements
response = response.replaceAll("<(script|SCRIPT)[^+]*?>[^>]*?<(/script|SCRIPT)>", "");

You can use this code to remove HTML tags including line breaks.

function remove_html_tags(html) {
    html = html.replace(/<div>/g, "").replace(/<\/div>/g, "<br>");
    html = html.replace(/<br>/g, "$br$");
    html = html.replace(/(?:\r\n|\r|\n)/g, '$br$');
    var tmp = document.createElement("DIV");
    tmp.innerHTML = html;
    html = tmp.textContent || tmp.innerText;
    html = html.replace(/\$br\$/g, "\n");
    return html;
}