How to remove HTML tag in Java

Question

Is there the regular expression that can completely remove a HTML tag? By the way, I'm using Java.

Solution 1

You should use a HTML parser instead. I like htmlCleaner, because it gives me a pretty printed version of the HTML.

With htmlCleaner you can do:

TagNode root = htmlCleaner.clean( stream );
Object[] found = root.evaluateXPath( "//div[id='something']" );
if( found.length > 0 && found instanceof TagNode ) {
    ((TagNode)found[0]).removeFromTree();
}

Solution 2

There is JSoup which is a java library made for HTML manipulation. Look at the clean() method and the WhiteList object. Easy to use solution!

Solution 3

If you just need to remove tags then you can use this regular expression:

content = content.replaceAll("<[^>]+>", "");

It will remove only tags, but not other HTML stuff. For more complex things you should use parser.

EDIT: To avoid problems with HTML comments you can do the following:

content = content.replaceAll("<!--.*?-->", "").replaceAll("<[^>]+>", "");

Solution 4

No. Regular expressions can not by definition parse HTML.

You could use a regex to s/<[^>]*\>// or something naive like that but it's going to be insufficient, especially if you're interested in removing the contents of tags.

As another poster said, use an actual HTML parser.

Solution 5

You don't need any HTML parser. The below code removes all HTML comments:

htmlString = htmlString.replaceAll("(?s)<!--.*?-->", "");

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