Regex in Javascript to remove links

Question

Hello,

I'm really sorry if this has been answered before but I just can't seem to find the proper answer. I have a string in JS and it includes an href tag. I want to remove all links AND the text. I know how to just remove the link and leave the inner text but I want to remove the link completely.

For example:

var s = "check this out <a href='http://www.google.com'&gt;Click me</a>. cool, huh?";

I would like to use regex so I'm left with:

s = "check this out. cool, huh?";

Thanks for your help,

g

Answer 1

Regexes are fundamentally bad at parsing HTML (see Can you provide some examples of why it is hard to parse XML and HTML with a regex? for why). What you need is an HTML parser. See Can you provide an example of parsing HTML with your favorite parser? for examples using a variety of parsers.

Answer 2

If you only want to remove <a> elements, the following should work well:

s.replace(/<a [^>]+>[^<]*<\/a>/, '');

This should work for the example you gave, but it won't work for nested tags, for example it wouldn't work with this HTML:

<a href="http://www.google.com"&gt;&lt;em&gt;Google&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;

Answer 3

This will strip out everything between <a and /a>:

mystr = "check this out <a href='http://www.google.com'&gt;Click me</a>. cool, huh?";
alert(mystr.replace(/<a\b[^>]*>(.*?)<\/a>/i,""));

It's not really foolproof, but maybe it'll do the trick for your purpose...

Answer 4

Just commented about John Resig's HTML parser. Maybe it helps on your problem.