Remove HTML tags from string including   in C#
If you can't use an HTML parser oriented solution to filter out the tags, here's a simple regex for it.
string noHTML = Regex.Replace(inputHTML, @"<[^>]+>| ", "").Trim();
You should ideally make another pass through a regex filter that takes care of multiple spaces as
string noHTMLNormalised = Regex.Replace(noHTML, @"\s{2,}", " ");
I took @Ravi Thapliyal's code and made a method: It is simple and might not clean everything, but so far it is doing what I need it to do.
public static string ScrubHtml(string value) {
var step1 = Regex.Replace(value, @"<[^>]+>| ", "").Trim();
var step2 = Regex.Replace(step1, @"\s{2,}", " ");
return step2;
}
I've been using this function for a while. Removes pretty much any messy html you can throw at it and leaves the text intact.
private static readonly Regex _tags_ = new Regex(@"<[^>]+?>", RegexOptions.Multiline | RegexOptions.Compiled);
//add characters that are should not be removed to this regex
private static readonly Regex _notOkCharacter_ = new Regex(@"[^\w;&#@.:/\\?=|%!() -]", RegexOptions.Compiled);
public static String UnHtml(String html)
{
html = HttpUtility.UrlDecode(html);
html = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(html);
html = RemoveTag(html, "<!--", "-->");
html = RemoveTag(html, "<script", "</script>");
html = RemoveTag(html, "<style", "</style>");
//replace matches of these regexes with space
html = _tags_.Replace(html, " ");
html = _notOkCharacter_.Replace(html, " ");
html = SingleSpacedTrim(html);
return html;
}
private static String RemoveTag(String html, String startTag, String endTag)
{
Boolean bAgain;
do
{
bAgain = false;
Int32 startTagPos = html.IndexOf(startTag, 0, StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase);
if (startTagPos < 0)
continue;
Int32 endTagPos = html.IndexOf(endTag, startTagPos + 1, StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase);
if (endTagPos <= startTagPos)
continue;
html = html.Remove(startTagPos, endTagPos - startTagPos + endTag.Length);
bAgain = true;
} while (bAgain);
return html;
}
private static String SingleSpacedTrim(String inString)
{
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
Boolean inBlanks = false;
foreach (Char c in inString)
{
switch (c)
{
case '\r':
case '\n':
case '\t':
case ' ':
if (!inBlanks)
{
inBlanks = true;
sb.Append(' ');
}
continue;
default:
inBlanks = false;
sb.Append(c);
break;
}
}
return sb.ToString().Trim();
}