How can I clean HTML tags out of a ColdFusion string?

Question

I am looking for a quick way to parse HTML tags out of a ColdFusion string. We are pulling in an RSS feed, that could potentially have anything in it. We are then doing some man

Answer 1

Disclaimer I am a fierce advocate of using a proper parser (instead of regex) to parse HTML. However, this question isn't about parsing HTML, but about destroying it. For all tasks that go beyond that, use a parser.

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I think your regex is good. As long as there is nothing more than removing all HTML tags from the input, using a regex like yours is safe.

Anything else would probably be more hassle than it's worth, but you could write a small function that loops through the string char-by-char once and removes everything that's within tag brackets — e.g.:

• switch on a "inTag" flag as soon as you encounter a "<" character,
• switch it off as soon as you encounter ">"
• copy characters to the output string as long as the flag is off
• for performance, use a StringBuilder Java object instead of string concatenation

For a high-demand part of your app, this may be faster than the regex. But the regex is clean and probably fast enough.

Maybe this modified regex has some advantages for you:

<[^>]*(?:>|$)

• catches unclosed tags at the end of the string
• [^>]* is better than (.|\n)

The use of REReplaceNoCase() is unnecessary when there are no actual letters in the pattern. Case-insensitive regex matching is slower than doing it case-sensitively.