removing all "<...>" from a java String

Question

I have a string and i'd like to remove all tags with < and >

For example:

in the String

<title>Java Code</title>

will be

Java Code

and

<pre><font size="7"><strong>Some text here

</strong></font><strong>

will be

Some text here

How can it be done with using charAt(i)? Thanks in advance

Any particular reason you don't want to use regular expressions? — Another Code, Mar 03 '12 at 11:56
@AnotherCode I have text with also full with < > tags, I wanna remove them all and only see the text. — Mustafa, Mar 03 '12 at 11:59
You can find similar post, it will help you, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/240546/removing-html-from-a-java-string — Vinesh, Mar 03 '12 at 11:59
If you are trying to parse html than I suggest you better use `html parser` for this task. — RanRag, Mar 03 '12 at 12:18

dacwe · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-03T12:04:50.637

How can it be done with using charAt(i)?

Here is how:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    String s = "<pre><font size=\"7\"><strong>Some text here\n\n</strong></font><strong>";

    String o = "";
    boolean append = true;
    for (int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++) {
        if (s.charAt(i) == '<')
            append = false;

        if (append)
            o += s.charAt(i);

        if (s.charAt(i) == '>')
            append = true;
    }

    System.out.println(o);
}

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 03 '12 at 11:58

2

It is quite simple to do this using regular expressions.

String src = "<title>Java Code</title>";
String dst = src.replaceAll("<.+?>", "");

System.out.println(dst);

answered Mar 03 '12 at 11:58

Martijn Courteaux

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1

He wanted to use `charAt`. :) – dacwe Mar 03 '12 at 11:58

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 03 '12 at 12:01

Since you specifically want to use chatAt(i), here is the algorithm,

Start traversing the string from the beginning.
If the character you encounter is an opening tag(<), start traversing the string until you find the closing tag (>). then check the next character, If it is (< ) , then repeat the same process again.
If the next character is not (<), Then start printing the string until you see another (<).
Then repeat step 2.

score 0 · Answer 4 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:24

with charAt, you could loop over all the characters in you string, removing everything from < until the next >. However, your string could contain non-ASCII UTF code points, which could break this approach.

I would go with a regex, something like

String someTextHere = "...";
String cleanedText = someTextHere.replaceAll( "<[^>]*?>", "" );

However, let me also point you to this question, which lists concerns with the regex approach.

removing all "<...>" from a java String

4 Answers4