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

Use Html.fromHtml

HTML Tags are

<a href=”…”> <b>,  <big>, <blockquote>, <br>, <cite>, <dfn>
<div align=”…”>,  <em>, <font size=”…” color=”…” face=”…”>
<h1>,  <h2>, <h3>, <h4>,  <h5>, <h6>
<i>, <p>, <small>
<strike>,  <strong>, <sub>, <sup>, <tt>, <u>

As per Android’s official Documentations any tags in the HTML will display as a generic replacement String which your program can then go through and replace with real strings.

Html.formHtml method takes an Html.TagHandler and an Html.ImageGetter as arguments as well as the text to parse.

Example

String Str_Html=" <p>This is about me text that the user can put into their profile</p> ";

Then

Your_TextView_Obj.setText(Html.fromHtml(Str_Html).toString());

Output

This is about me text that the user can put into their profile

Answer 2

This should work -

use this

  text.replaceAll('<.*?>' , " ") -> This will replace all the html tags with a space.

and this

  text.replaceAll('&.*?;' , "")-> this will replace all the tags which starts with "&" and ends with ";" like  , &, > etc.

Answer 3

To get formateed plain html text you can do that:

String BR_ESCAPED = "<br/>";
Element el=Jsoup.parse(html).select("body");
el.select("br").append(BR_ESCAPED);
el.select("p").append(BR_ESCAPED+BR_ESCAPED);
el.select("h1").append(BR_ESCAPED+BR_ESCAPED);
el.select("h2").append(BR_ESCAPED+BR_ESCAPED);
el.select("h3").append(BR_ESCAPED+BR_ESCAPED);
el.select("h4").append(BR_ESCAPED+BR_ESCAPED);
el.select("h5").append(BR_ESCAPED+BR_ESCAPED);
String nodeValue=el.text();
nodeValue=nodeValue.replaceAll(BR_ESCAPED, "<br/>");
nodeValue=nodeValue.replaceAll("(\\s*<br[^>]*>){3,}", "<br/><br/>");

To get formateed plain text change <br/> by \n and change last line by:

nodeValue=nodeValue.replaceAll("(\\s*\n){3,}", "<br/><br/>");

Answer 4

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;
}

Answer 5

If you're writing for Android you can do this...

android.text.Html.fromHtml(instruction).toString()

Answer 6

Also very simple using Jericho, and you can retain some of the formatting (line breaks and links, for example).

    Source htmlSource = new Source(htmlText);
    Segment htmlSeg = new Segment(htmlSource, 0, htmlSource.length());
    Renderer htmlRend = new Renderer(htmlSeg);
    System.out.println(htmlRend.toString());