Is there an easy way to strip HTML from a QString in Qt?

Question

I have a QString with some HTML in it... is there an easy way to strip the HTML from it? I basically want just the actual text content.

<i>Test:</i><img src="blah.png" /><br> A test case

Would become:

Test: A test case

I'm curious to know if Qt has a string function or utility for this.

score 38 · Answer 1 · answered May 14 '11 at 09:24

38

QString s = "<i>Test:</i><img src=\"blah.png\" /><br> A test case";
s.remove(QRegExp("<[^>]*>"));
// s == "Test: A test case"

answered May 14 '11 at 09:24

k06a

17,755
10
70
110

1

This answer won't suffice for strings with HTML entities e.g. < – Michael Platings Aug 12 '15 at 19:56
2

The problem with this, off the top of my head, is that `
` gets removed rather than get converted to the newline character. – Marcus Mar 24 '17 at 19:40
@Marcus So exactly what the question asked for. None of the HTML gets converted to anything, that's a totally different request – Michael Mrozek Oct 01 '17 at 04:42

Vishesh Handa · Answer 2 · 2013-03-31T15:04:08.137

32

If you don't care about performance that much then QTextDocument does a pretty good job of converting HTML to plain text.

QTextDocument doc;
doc.setHtml( htmlString );

return doc.toPlainText();

I know this question is old, but I was looking for a quick and dirty way to handle incorrect HTML. The XML parser wasn't giving good results.

edited Mar 31 '13 at 15:04

answered Mar 03 '12 at 13:17

Vishesh Handa

1,830
2
14
17

I think this is the best answer. It keeps basic format like breaks. – Edwin Rodríguez Nov 12 '15 at 12:34
15

Perhaps a slightly better solution would be to use `QTextDocumentFragment`: `QString plainText = QTextDocumentFragment::fromHtml( htmlString ).toPlainText();` – Marcus Mar 24 '17 at 19:43
3

You should make this is a real answer, rather than a comment. Best solution I think. – Tim Angus Jan 25 '18 at 14:29

VestniK · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-28T11:53:35.090

14

You may try to iterate through the string using QXmlStreamReader class and extract all text (if you HTML string is guarantied to be well formed XML).

Something like this:

QXmlStreamReader xml(htmlString);
QString textString;
while (!xml.atEnd()) {
    if ( xml.readNext() == QXmlStreamReader::Characters ) {
        textString += xml.text();
    }
}

but I'm unsure that its 100% valid ussage of QXmlStreamReader API since I've used it quite longe time ago and may forget something.

edited Aug 28 '12 at 11:53

answered May 09 '10 at 22:44

VestniK

1,910
2
17
29

Thanks. I'm not trying to validate it or extract it. I just want rid of it. – Nathan Osman May 09 '10 at 23:00
Oh, and the text I'm getting *is* from a trusted source (not user input) so I should be fine. – Nathan Osman May 09 '10 at 23:01
Is not working for case when no any html tags. So textString will be empty string. – Ivan Romanov Oct 10 '16 at 11:05

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 21 '15 at 07:23

the situation that some html is not quite validate xml make it worse to work it out correctly.

If it's valid xml (or not too bad formated), I think QXmlStreamReader + QXmlStreamEntityResolver might not be bad idea.

Sample code in: https://github.com/ycheng/misccode/blob/master/qt_html_parse/utils.cpp

(this can be a comment, but I still don't have permission to do so)

score -5 · Answer 5 · answered Sep 22 '15 at 19:26

-5

this answer is for who read this post later and using Qt5 or later. simply escape the html characters using inbuilt functions as below.

QString str="<h1>some hedding </h1>"; // a string containing html tags.
QString esc=str.toHtmlEscaped(); //esc contains the html escaped srring.

answered Sep 22 '15 at 19:26

danial weaber

846
2
17
37

1

I'm not looking to escape the tags, I wish to remove them. – Nathan Osman Sep 22 '15 at 20:22
1

`QString::toHtmlEscaped` does not remove html tags. Just converts characters like `<`, `>` etc, to html codes. – Marcus Mar 24 '17 at 19:36

Is there an easy way to strip HTML from a QString in Qt?

5 Answers5

Linked