Remove style tag from a text file with regex

Question

I need to remove style tags from text file..

I tried the following code

String text = readFile("E:/textwithstyletags.txt");
retVal = text.replaceAll("<style(.+?)</style>", "");

it works when the text file has style tags without new lines i.e. <style> body{ color:red; } </style>

It doesn't work when there are new lines, like this

<style> 
body{ 
color:red; 
} 
</style>

Solution 1

You can use [\s\S] in place of . in your regex

i.e:

retVal = text.replaceAll("<style([\\s\\S]+?)</style>", "");

Solution 2

Tested on regex101.

Pattern:

<style((.|\n|\r)*?)<\/style>    

Your code:

String text = readFile("E:/textwithstyletags.txt");
retVal = text.replaceAll("<style((.|\\n|\\r)*?)<\\/style>", "");

Solution 3

Try this regex:

retVal  = text.replaceAll("(?i)<style.*?>.*?</style>", "");

On a side note you can look at JSoup which is a java library made for HTML manipulation.

Solution 4

you can use

this expression <style[\\w\\W]+?</style>

retVal = text.replaceAll("<style[\\w\\W]+?</style>", "");

It says to find all the alphanumeric character including the underscore(\w) and not word (\W) character till </script>

View more solutions

Comments

[Mark Timothy]

please post the complete regex expression

[karthik manchala]

@user3264864 use the above expression

[Mark Timothy]

invalid escape sequence

[Saif]

use double back slash \\w and \\W @user3264864

[Bhaskara Arani]

<style[\\w\\W]+?<\\/style\\> It will do the job

[bmiller]

I like this, handles everything non-greedy and case insensitive, no muss no fuss. Although I think you need to add the s flag (dot matches all) to handle linefeeds between open & close tags. like: retVal = text.replaceAll("(?is)<style.*?>.*?</style>", "");

[risingStark]

Thanks very much, it helped me a lot.