Remove HTML Tags from an NSString on the iPhone

Question

There are a couple of different ways to remove HTML tags from an NSString in Cocoa.

One way is to render the string into an

Answer 1

Here's a more efficient solution than the accepted answer:

- (NSString*)hp_stringByRemovingTags
{
    static NSRegularExpression *regex = nil;
    static dispatch_once_t onceToken;
    dispatch_once(&onceToken, ^{
        regex = [NSRegularExpression regularExpressionWithPattern:@"<[^>]+>" options:kNilOptions error:nil];
    });

    // Use reverse enumerator to delete characters without affecting indexes
    NSArray *matches =[regex matchesInString:self options:kNilOptions range:NSMakeRange(0, self.length)];
    NSEnumerator *enumerator = matches.reverseObjectEnumerator;

    NSTextCheckingResult *match = nil;
    NSMutableString *modifiedString = self.mutableCopy;
    while ((match = [enumerator nextObject]))
    {
        [modifiedString deleteCharactersInRange:match.range];
    }
    return modifiedString;
}

The above NSString category uses a regular expression to find all the matching tags, makes a copy of the original string and finally removes all the tags in place by iterating over them in reverse order. It's more efficient because:

• The regular expression is initialised only once.
• A single copy of the original string is used.

This performed well enough for me but a solution using NSScanner might be more efficient.

Like the accepted answer, this solution doesn't address all the border cases requested by @lfalin. Those would be require much more expensive parsing which the average use case most likely doesn't need.