Remove HTML Tags in Javascript with Regex

user_106403 0
Viewed 221832

I am trying to remove all the html tags out of a string in Javascript. Heres what I have... I can't figure out why its not working....any know what I am doing wrong?

<script type="text/javascript">

var regex = "/<(.|\n)*?>/";
var body = "<p>test</p>";
var result = body.replace(regex, "");
alert(result);

</script>

Thanks a lot!

javascript regex
13 Answers

This is a solution for HTML tag and &nbsp etc and you can remove and add conditions to get the text without HTML and you can replace it by any.

convertHtmlToText(passHtmlBlock)
{
   str = str.toString();
  return str.replace(/<[^>]*(>|$)|&nbsp;|&zwnj;|&raquo;|&laquo;|&gt;/g, 'ReplaceIfYouWantOtherWiseKeepItEmpty');
}
user_75405730

The way I do it is practically a one-liner.

The function creates a Range object and then creates a DocumentFragment in the Range with the string as the child content.

Then it grabs the text of the fragment, removes any "invisible"/zero-width characters, and trims it of any leading/trailing white space.

I realize this question is old, I just thought my solution was unique and wanted to share. :)

function getTextFromString(htmlString) {
    return document
        .createRange()
        // Creates a fragment and turns the supplied string into HTML nodes
        .createContextualFragment(htmlString)
        // Gets the text from the fragment
        .textContent
        // Removes the Zero-Width Space, Zero-Width Joiner, Zero-Width No-Break Space, Left-To-Right Mark, and Right-To-Left Mark characters
        .replace(/[\u200B-\u200D\uFEFF\u200E\u200F]/g, '')
        // Trims off any extra space on either end of the string
        .trim();
}

var cleanString = getTextFromString('<p>Hello world! I <em>love</em> <strong>JavaScript</strong>!!!</p>');

alert(cleanString);
user_11359040

If you want to do this with a library and are not using JQuery, the best JS library specifically for this purpose is striptags.

It is heavier than a regex (17.9kb), but if you need greater security than a regex can provide/don't care about the extra 17.6kb, then it's the best solution.

user_91546680
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