How Can I strip HTML from Text in .NET?

Answer 1

Take a look at this Strip HTML tags from a string using regular expressions

Answer 2

You can use something like this

string strwithouthtmltag;
strwithouthtmltag = Regex.Replace(strWithHTMLTags, "<[^>]*>", string.Empty)

Answer 3

If you are just storing text for indexing then you probably want to do a bit more than just remove the HTML, such as ignoring stop-words and removing words shorter than (say) 3 characters. However, a simple tag and stripper I once wrote goes something like this:

 public static string StripTags(string value)
 {
  if (value == null)
   return string.Empty;

  string pattern = @"&.{1,8};";
  value = Regex.Replace(value, pattern, " ");
  pattern = @"<(.|\n)*?>";
  return Regex.Replace(value, pattern, string.Empty);
 }

It's old and I'm sure it can be optimised (perhaps using a compiled reg-ex?). But it does work and may help...

Answer 4

You could:

• Use a plain old TEXTAREA (styled for height/width/font/etc.) rather than TinyMCE.
• Use TinyMCE's built-in configuration options for stripping unwanted HTML.
• Use HtmlDecode(RegEx.Replace(mystring, "<[^>]+>", "")) on the server.

Answer 5

Here's Jeff Atwood's RefactorMe code link for his Sanitize HTML method

Answer 6

I downloaded the HtmlAgilityPack and created this function:

string StripHtml(string html)
{
    // create whitespace between html elements, so that words do not run together
    html = html.Replace(">","> ");

    // parse html
    var doc = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument(); 
    doc.LoadHtml(html);

    // strip html decoded text from html
    string text = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(doc.DocumentNode.InnerText); 

    // replace all whitespace with a single space and remove leading and trailing whitespace
    return Regex.Replace(text, @"\s+", " ").Trim();
}

Answer 7

As you may have malformed HTML in the system: BeautifulSoup or similar could be used.

It is written in Python; I am not sure how it could be interfaced - using the .NET language IronPython?