Hi,
how can I remove links from a raw html text? I've got:
Foo bar <a href="http://www.foo.com">blah</a> bar foo
and want to get:
Foo bar blah bar foo
afterwards.
views:
68answers:
4
+2
A:
You're looking to parse HTML with regexps, and this won't work in all but the simplest cases, since HTML isn't regular. A much more reliable solution is to use an HTML parser. Numerous exist, for many different languages.
Brian Agnew
2010-07-04 23:11:25
This is a pretty simple case though. You're not parsing the HTML so much as stripping a specific string (`</a>`) and any strings matching a specific pattern (`<a ... >`) from a block of text. This type of manipulation is precisely what regexp is designed for. None of aspects of HTML which make it _non-regular_ come into play (i.e. anchors can't be nested within one another, and we don't care about any other tags).
Lèse majesté
2010-07-05 01:25:17
But do you care about tags in comments etc.?
Brian Agnew
2010-07-05 07:06:12
This would produce "Foo bar bar foo" instead of "Foo bar blah bar foo" for the example in question. See danlei's solution for the correct version.
Bolo
2010-07-04 23:28:36
+2
A:
sed -re 's|<a [^>]*>([^<]*)</a>|\1|g'
But Brian's answer is right: This should only be used in very simple cases.
danlei
2010-07-04 23:23:32
A:
$ echo 'Foo bar <a href="http://www.foo.com">blah</a> bar foo' | awk 'BEGIN{RS="</a>"}/<a href/{gsub(/<a href=\042.*\042>/,"")}1'
Foo bar blah bar foo
ghostdog74
2010-07-04 23:47:16