How to remove only html tags in a string using javascript

Question

I want to remove html tags from given string using javascript. I looked into current approaches but there are some unsolved problems occured with them.

Current solutions

Answer 1

If you want to keep invalid markup untouched, regular expressions is your best bet. Something like this might work:

 text = html.replace(/<\/?(span|div|img|p...)\b[^<>]*>/g, "")

Expand (span|div|img|p...) into a list of all tags (or only those you want to remove). NB: the list must be sorted by length, longer tags first!

This may provide incorrect results in some edge cases (like attributes with <> characters), but the only real alternative would be to program a complete html parser by yourself. Not that it would be extremely complicated, but might be an overkill here. Let us know.