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

I know this is old, but I was just working on a project that required me to filter HTML and this worked fine:

noHTMLString.replaceAll("\\&.*?\\;", "");

instead of this:

html = html.replaceAll(" ","");
html = html.replaceAll("&"."");

Answer 2

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());

Answer 3

One more way can be to use com.google.gdata.util.common.html.HtmlToText class like

MyWriter.toConsole(HtmlToText.htmlToPlainText(htmlResponse));

This is not bullet proof code though and when I run it on wikipedia entries I am getting style info also. However I believe for small/simple jobs this would be effective.

Answer 4

One could also use Apache Tika for this purpose. By default it preserves whitespaces from the stripped html, which may be desired in certain situations:

InputStream htmlInputStream = ..
HtmlParser htmlParser = new HtmlParser();
HtmlContentHandler htmlContentHandler = new HtmlContentHandler();
htmlParser.parse(htmlInputStream, htmlContentHandler, new Metadata())
System.out.println(htmlContentHandler.getBodyText().trim())

Answer 5

Another way is to use javax.swing.text.html.HTMLEditorKit to extract the text.

import java.io.*;
import javax.swing.text.html.*;
import javax.swing.text.html.parser.*;

public class Html2Text extends HTMLEditorKit.ParserCallback {
    StringBuffer s;

    public Html2Text() {
    }

    public void parse(Reader in) throws IOException {
        s = new StringBuffer();
        ParserDelegator delegator = new ParserDelegator();
        // the third parameter is TRUE to ignore charset directive
        delegator.parse(in, this, Boolean.TRUE);
    }

    public void handleText(char[] text, int pos) {
        s.append(text);
    }

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

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            // the HTML to convert
            FileReader in = new FileReader("java-new.html");
            Html2Text parser = new Html2Text();
            parser.parse(in);
            in.close();
            System.out.println(parser.getText());
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

ref : Remove HTML tags from a file to extract only the TEXT

Answer 6

Use a HTML parser instead of regex. This is dead simple with Jsoup.

public static String html2text(String html) {
    return Jsoup.parse(html).text();
}

Jsoup also supports removing HTML tags against a customizable whitelist, which is very useful if you want to allow only e.g. <b>, <i> and <u>.

See also:

• RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags
• What are the pros and cons of the leading Java HTML parsers?
• XSS prevention in JSP/Servlet web application