Remove HTML tags from a String

Question

Is there a good way to remove HTML from a Java string? A simple regex like

 replaceAll("\\<.*?>","") 

will work, but things like & wont be converted correctly and non-HTML between the two angle brackets will be removed (i.e. the .*? in the regex will disappear).

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

Use a HTML parser instead of regex. This is dead simple with Jsoup.

public static String html2text(String html) {
    return Jsoup.parse(html).text();
}

Jsoup also supports removing HTML tags against a customizable whitelist, which is very useful if you want to allow only e.g. <b>, <i> and <u>.

See also:

• RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags
• What are the pros and cons of the leading Java HTML parsers?
• XSS prevention in JSP/Servlet web application

Answer 3

One more way can be to use com.google.gdata.util.common.html.HtmlToText class like

MyWriter.toConsole(HtmlToText.htmlToPlainText(htmlResponse));

This is not bullet proof code though and when I run it on wikipedia entries I am getting style info also. However I believe for small/simple jobs this would be effective.

Answer 4

Here's a lightly more fleshed out update to try to handle some formatting for breaks and lists. I used Amaya's output as a guide.

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.Reader;
import java.io.StringReader;
import java.util.Stack;
import java.util.logging.Logger;

import javax.swing.text.MutableAttributeSet;
import javax.swing.text.html.HTML;
import javax.swing.text.html.HTMLEditorKit;
import javax.swing.text.html.parser.ParserDelegator;

public class HTML2Text extends HTMLEditorKit.ParserCallback {
    private static final Logger log = Logger
            .getLogger(Logger.GLOBAL_LOGGER_NAME);

    private StringBuffer stringBuffer;

    private Stack<IndexType> indentStack;

    public static class IndexType {
        public String type;
        public int counter; // used for ordered lists

        public IndexType(String type) {
            this.type = type;
            counter = 0;
        }
    }

    public HTML2Text() {
        stringBuffer = new StringBuffer();
        indentStack = new Stack<IndexType>();
    }

    public static String convert(String html) {
        HTML2Text parser = new HTML2Text();
        Reader in = new StringReader(html);
        try {
            // the HTML to convert
            parser.parse(in);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            log.severe(e.getMessage());
        } finally {
            try {
                in.close();
            } catch (IOException ioe) {
                // this should never happen
            }
        }
        return parser.getText();
    }

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

    public void handleStartTag(HTML.Tag t, MutableAttributeSet a, int pos) {
        log.info("StartTag:" + t.toString());
        if (t.toString().equals("p")) {
            if (stringBuffer.length() > 0
                    && !stringBuffer.substring(stringBuffer.length() - 1)
                            .equals("\n")) {
                newLine();
            }
            newLine();
        } else if (t.toString().equals("ol")) {
            indentStack.push(new IndexType("ol"));
            newLine();
        } else if (t.toString().equals("ul")) {
            indentStack.push(new IndexType("ul"));
            newLine();
        } else if (t.toString().equals("li")) {
            IndexType parent = indentStack.peek();
            if (parent.type.equals("ol")) {
                String numberString = "" + (++parent.counter) + ".";
                stringBuffer.append(numberString);
                for (int i = 0; i < (4 - numberString.length()); i++) {
                    stringBuffer.append(" ");
                }
            } else {
                stringBuffer.append("*   ");
            }
            indentStack.push(new IndexType("li"));
        } else if (t.toString().equals("dl")) {
            newLine();
        } else if (t.toString().equals("dt")) {
            newLine();
        } else if (t.toString().equals("dd")) {
            indentStack.push(new IndexType("dd"));
            newLine();
        }
    }

    private void newLine() {
        stringBuffer.append("\n");
        for (int i = 0; i < indentStack.size(); i++) {
            stringBuffer.append("    ");
        }
    }

    public void handleEndTag(HTML.Tag t, int pos) {
        log.info("EndTag:" + t.toString());
        if (t.toString().equals("p")) {
            newLine();
        } else if (t.toString().equals("ol")) {
            indentStack.pop();
            ;
            newLine();
        } else if (t.toString().equals("ul")) {
            indentStack.pop();
            ;
            newLine();
        } else if (t.toString().equals("li")) {
            indentStack.pop();
            ;
            newLine();
        } else if (t.toString().equals("dd")) {
            indentStack.pop();
            ;
        }
    }

    public void handleSimpleTag(HTML.Tag t, MutableAttributeSet a, int pos) {
        log.info("SimpleTag:" + t.toString());
        if (t.toString().equals("br")) {
            newLine();
        }
    }

    public void handleText(char[] text, int pos) {
        log.info("Text:" + new String(text));
        stringBuffer.append(text);
    }

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

    public static void main(String args[]) {
        String html = "<html><body><p>paragraph at start</p>hello<br />What is happening?<p>this is a<br />mutiline paragraph</p><ol>  <li>This</li>  <li>is</li>  <li>an</li>  <li>ordered</li>  <li>list    <p>with</p>    <ul>      <li>another</li>      <li>list        <dl>          <dt>This</dt>          <dt>is</dt>            <dd>sdasd</dd>            <dd>sdasda</dd>            <dd>asda              <p>aasdas</p>            </dd>            <dd>sdada</dd>          <dt>fsdfsdfsd</dt>        </dl>        <dl>          <dt>vbcvcvbcvb</dt>          <dt>cvbcvbc</dt>            <dd>vbcbcvbcvb</dd>          <dt>cvbcv</dt>          <dt></dt>        </dl>        <dl>          <dt></dt>        </dl></li>      <li>cool</li>    </ul>    <p>stuff</p>  </li>  <li>cool</li></ol><p></p></body></html>";
        System.out.println(convert(html));
    }
}

Answer 5

you can simply make a method with multiple replaceAll() like

String RemoveTag(String html){
   html = html.replaceAll("\\<.*?>","")
   html = html.replaceAll("&nbsp;","");
   html = html.replaceAll("&amp;"."");
   ----------
   ----------
   return html;
}

Use this link for most common replacements you need: http://tunes.org/wiki/html_20special_20characters_20and_20symbols.html

It is simple but effective. I use this method first to remove the junk but not the very first line i.e replaceAll("\<.*?>",""), and later i use specific keywords to search for indexes and then use .substring(start, end) method to strip away unnecessary stuff. As this is more robust and you can pin point exactly what you need in the entire html page.

Answer 6

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.