Remove HTML tags from a String

Question

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

replaceAll("\\\\<.*?>", &quo         


        

Answer 1

The accepted answer did not work for me for the test case I indicated: the result of "a < b or b > c" is "a b or b > c".

So, I used TagSoup instead. Here's a shot that worked for my test case (and a couple of others):

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

import org.ccil.cowan.tagsoup.Parser;
import org.xml.sax.Attributes;
import org.xml.sax.ContentHandler;
import org.xml.sax.InputSource;
import org.xml.sax.Locator;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;
import org.xml.sax.XMLReader;

/**
 * Take HTML and give back the text part while dropping the HTML tags.
 *
 * There is some risk that using TagSoup means we'll permute non-HTML text.
 * However, it seems to work the best so far in test cases.
 *
 * @author dan
 * @see TagSoup 
 */
public class Html2Text2 implements ContentHandler {
private StringBuffer sb;

public Html2Text2() {
}

public void parse(String str) throws IOException, SAXException {
    XMLReader reader = new Parser();
    reader.setContentHandler(this);
    sb = new StringBuffer();
    reader.parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(str)));
}

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

@Override
public void characters(char[] ch, int start, int length)
    throws SAXException {
    for (int idx = 0; idx < length; idx++) {
    sb.append(ch[idx+start]);
    }
}

@Override
public void ignorableWhitespace(char[] ch, int start, int length)
    throws SAXException {
    sb.append(ch);
}

// The methods below do not contribute to the text
@Override
public void endDocument() throws SAXException {
}

@Override
public void endElement(String uri, String localName, String qName)
    throws SAXException {
}

@Override
public void endPrefixMapping(String prefix) throws SAXException {
}


@Override
public void processingInstruction(String target, String data)
    throws SAXException {
}

@Override
public void setDocumentLocator(Locator locator) {
}

@Override
public void skippedEntity(String name) throws SAXException {
}

@Override
public void startDocument() throws SAXException {
}

@Override
public void startElement(String uri, String localName, String qName,
    Attributes atts) throws SAXException {
}

@Override
public void startPrefixMapping(String prefix, String uri)
    throws SAXException {
}
}