Regular expression to remove HTML tags

Question

I am using the following Regular Expresion to remove html tags from a string. It works except I leave the closing tag. If I attempt to remove: <a href="blah">blah</a> it leaves the <a/>.

I do not know Regular Expression syntax at all and fumbled through this. Can someone with RegEx knowledge please provide me with a pattern that will work.

Here is my code:

  string sPattern = @"<\/?!?(img|a)[^>]*>";
  Regex rgx = new Regex(sPattern);
  Match m = rgx.Match(sSummary);
  string sResult = "";
  if (m.Success)
   sResult = rgx.Replace(sSummary, "", 1);

I am looking to remove the first occurence of the <a> and <img> tags.

Answer 1

Using a regular expression to parse HTML is fraught with pitfalls. HTML is not a regular language and hence can't be 100% correctly parsed with a regex. This is just one of many problems you will run into. The best approach is to use an HTML / XML parser to do this for you.

Here is a link to a blog post I wrote awhile back which goes into more details about this problem.

• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jaredpar/archive/2008/10/15/regular-expression-limitations.aspx

That being said, here's a solution that should fix this particular problem. It in no way is a perfect solution though.

var pattern = @"<(img|a)[^>]*>(?<content>[^<]*)<";
var regex = new Regex(pattern);
var m = regex.Match(sSummary);
if ( m.Success ) { 
  sResult = m.Groups["content"].Value;

Answer 2

So the HTML parser everyone's talking about: http://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com/

If it's clean XHTML, you can also use System.Xml.Linq.XDocument or System.Xml.XmlDocument.

Answer 3

Here's an extension method I created using a simple regular expression to remove HTML tags from a string:

/// <summary>
/// Converts an Html string to plain text, and replaces all br tags with line breaks.
/// </summary>
/// <returns></returns>
/// <remarks></remarks>
[Extension()]
public string ToPlainText(string s)
{

    s = s.Replace("<br>", Constants.vbCrLf);
    s = s.Replace("<br />", Constants.vbCrLf);
    s = s.Replace("<br/>", Constants.vbCrLf);


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


    return s;
}

Hope that helps.

Answer 4

You can use already existing libraries to strip off the html tags. One good one being Chilkat C# Library.