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 it is been a while since this question as been asked, but I found another solution, this is what worked for me:

Pattern REMOVE_TAGS = Pattern.compile("<.+?>");
    Source source= new Source(htmlAsString);
 Matcher m = REMOVE_TAGS.matcher(sourceStep.getTextExtractor().toString());
                        String clearedHtml= m.replaceAll("");

Answer 2

If you're writing for Android you can do this...

android.text.Html.fromHtml(instruction).toString()

Answer 3

You might want to replace <br/> and </p> tags with newlines before stripping the HTML to prevent it becoming an illegible mess as Tim suggests.

The only way I can think of removing HTML tags but leaving non-HTML between angle brackets would be check against a list of HTML tags. Something along these lines...

replaceAll("\\<[\s]*tag[^>]*>","")

Then HTML-decode special characters such as &. The result should not be considered to be sanitized.

Answer 4

To get formateed plain html text you can do that:

String BR_ESCAPED = "<br/>";
Element el=Jsoup.parse(html).select("body");
el.select("br").append(BR_ESCAPED);
el.select("p").append(BR_ESCAPED+BR_ESCAPED);
el.select("h1").append(BR_ESCAPED+BR_ESCAPED);
el.select("h2").append(BR_ESCAPED+BR_ESCAPED);
el.select("h3").append(BR_ESCAPED+BR_ESCAPED);
el.select("h4").append(BR_ESCAPED+BR_ESCAPED);
el.select("h5").append(BR_ESCAPED+BR_ESCAPED);
String nodeValue=el.text();
nodeValue=nodeValue.replaceAll(BR_ESCAPED, "<br/>");
nodeValue=nodeValue.replaceAll("(\\s*<br[^>]*>){3,}", "<br/><br/>");

To get formateed plain text change <br/> by \n and change last line by:

nodeValue=nodeValue.replaceAll("(\\s*\n){3,}", "<br/><br/>");

Answer 5

Sometimes the html string come from xml with such &lt. When using Jsoup we need parse it and then clean it.

Document doc = Jsoup.parse(htmlstrl);
Whitelist wl = Whitelist.none();
String plain = Jsoup.clean(doc.text(), wl);

While only using Jsoup.parse(htmlstrl).text() can't remove tags.

Answer 6

Alternatively, one can use HtmlCleaner:

private CharSequence removeHtmlFrom(String html) {
    return new HtmlCleaner().clean(html).getText();
}