Remove HTML Tags in Javascript with Regex

Question

I am trying to remove all the html tags out of a string in Javascript. Heres what I have... I can't figure out why its not working....any know what I am doing wrong?

<script type="text/javascript">

var regex = "/<(.|\n)*?>/";
var body = "<p>test</p>";
var result = body.replace(regex, "");
alert(result);

</script>

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

Try this, noting that the grammar of HTML is too complex for regular expressions to be correct 100% of the time:

var regex = /(<([^>]+)>)/ig;
var body = "<p>test</p>";
var result = body.replace(regex, "");
alert(result);

If you're willing to use a library such as jQuery, you could simply do this:

alert($('<p>test</p>').text());

Answer 2

For a proper HTML sanitizer in JS, see http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/wiki/JsHtmlSanitizer