C++: Remove all HTML formatting from string?

Question

Hi,

I have a string which might include br or span.../span tags or other HTML characters/entities. I want a robust way of stripping all that and getting the remaining UTF-8 characters. This be should be cross-platform, ideally.

Something like this would be ideal:

http://snipplr.com/view/15261/python-decode-and-strip-html-entites-to-unicode/

but that also removes the tags.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Do you want to simply delete the elements, or to convert HTML to plain text?

Option 1:

If you just want to delete all occurances of and you can use a regex search and replace.

Option 2:

If what you're really trying to do is take a page that has formatting and convert it to plain text, the simplest and most robust way I can think of is to use a browser, or some browser engine, to actually parse the HTML and extract the text from it.

IOW, this is equivalent to copying a web page from the browser into the clipboard and then pasting it into notepad.

Answer 2

Just how stringent are your requirements? A simple two-state FSA ought to do. Start in the READCHAR state. Whenever you read a '<' in that state, transition to the READTAG state; otherwise, write the character to your result string. Whenever you're in the READTAG state and read a '>', transition back to the READCHAR state.

Edit: Oops. Missed the part of about entities. You'll nead a READENTITY state for that too. When you transition out of it, you could also convert the code into the corresponding UTF-8 character.

Answer 3

I'm not clear on what you want.

Input: This is a string

of text & on many lines "

Should this output:

1) This is a string <br> <br /> of text & on many lines "   (Replace &amp; with & and &quot; with ") 
2) This is a string of text & on many lines "