remove all HTML formatting from a string

Question

I am trying to compare 2 strings but i just realized that one has some html formatting already.

How can i get these two strings to match when doing string1 == string2. (NOTE: i dont know what the HTML formatting is going to be upfront)

string1 = "This is a test";
string1 = "<font color=\"black\" size=\"1\">This is a test</font>";

dup http://stackoverflow.com/questions/787932/using-c-regular-expressions-to-remove-html-tags — Srinivas Reddy Thatiparthy, Aug 06 '10 at 11:03
That is not valid C#. `string1 = "This is a test"` - see the `"`? — Oded, Aug 06 '10 at 11:04
The HTML version is also not valid C# - you need to escape the inner `"`. — Oded, Aug 06 '10 at 11:09

score 7 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 24 '17 at 18:18

7

Load the html into Html Agility Pack, and extract only the text.

string html = "<html><body><div>test</div></body></html>";
HtmlDocument document = new HtmlDocument();
document.LoadHtml(html)
string text = document.DocumentNode.InnerText;

This will not remove the content of <script> nodes, but you can easily remove the script nodes first.

edited Nov 24 '17 at 18:18

SpruceMoose

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answered Aug 06 '10 at 11:03

Mikael Svenson

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Obligatory link - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 – Oded Aug 06 '10 at 11:09
@Mikael Svenson - how do extract only the text using the HTML Agility Pack ? – leora Aug 06 '10 at 11:12
@ooo: I added a sample on how to do it. – Mikael Svenson Aug 06 '10 at 11:14
HtmlAgilityPack is pretty awesome for parsing HTML. – alimbada Aug 06 '10 at 11:17
@Mikael Svenson - can i simply shove in This is a test into this code above as it doesn't seem to work. hw.Load() seems to be looking for a URL as the parameter – leora Aug 06 '10 at 13:25
@ooo use HtmlNode.CreateNode(myHtmlString) to create a new HtmlNode and then get the InnerText of the instance – alimbada Aug 06 '10 at 14:03
@Mikael Svenson - thanks . .this worked but i found one issue.. i put that issue in question here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3425554/does-the-html-agility-pack-work-on-internal-text – leora Aug 06 '10 at 16:06
Are you sure that `InnerText` removes *all* HTML tags, rather than just the outermost pair? – Timwi Aug 06 '10 at 20:14
Yes. Just like it will in the DOM object on a webpage (except innerText is not cross platform javascript). InnerText gives back all text inside the container you start from.
lala
lala
gives the same result as
lala
lala
– Mikael Svenson Aug 06 '10 at 20:41

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 20 '16 at 05:24

0

string newText = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(OldHtmlTextHere, "<[^>]*>", string.Empty);

answered Jun 20 '16 at 05:24

Moslem Hadi

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Hehe, cool. This may still fail though in case the inner text has character entities like & . Then again, I am not sure if the accepted anser's solution does take care of that. – Martin Maat Jun 20 '16 at 05:49
@MartinMaat I don know, I use this function in all of my projects. never let me down! – Moslem Hadi Jun 20 '16 at 12:57

score -5 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 06 '10 at 11:06

-5

Check out system.web.Httputility.HTMLdecode

answered Aug 06 '10 at 11:06

PPShein

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This will not let you extract only the text, or remove your tags. – Mikael Svenson Aug 06 '10 at 11:08

remove all HTML formatting from a string

3 Answers3