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complex search and replace strings with JavaScript [duplicate]

Is there an easy way to take a string of html in JavaScript and strip out the html?

If you're running in a browser, then the easiest way is just to let the browser do it for you...
function stripHtml(html)
{
let tmp = document.createElement("DIV");
tmp.innerHTML = html;
return tmp.textContent || tmp.innerText || "";
}
Note: as folks have noted in the comments, this is best avoided if you don't control the source of the HTML (for example, don't run this on anything that could've come from user input). For those scenarios, you can still let the browser do the work for you - see Saba's answer on using the now widely-available DOMParser.

myString.replace(/<[^>]*>?/gm, '');

Simplest way:
jQuery(html).text();
That retrieves all the text from a string of html.

I would like to share an edited version of the Shog9's approved answer.
As Mike Samuel pointed with a comment, that function can execute inline javascript code.
But Shog9 is right when saying "let the browser do it for you..."
so.. here my edited version, using DOMParser:
function strip(html){
let doc = new DOMParser().parseFromString(html, 'text/html');
return doc.body.textContent || "";
}
here the code to test the inline javascript:
strip("<img onerror='alert(\"could run arbitrary JS here\")' src=bogus>")
Also, it does not request resources on parse (like images)
strip("Just text <img src='https://assets.rbl.ms/4155638/980x.jpg'>")

As an extension to the jQuery method, if your string might not contain HTML (eg if you are trying to remove HTML from a form field)
jQuery(html).text();
will return an empty string if there is no HTML
Use:
jQuery('<p>' + html + '</p>').text();
instead.
Update:
As has been pointed out in the comments, in some circumstances this solution will execute javascript contained within html if the value of html could be influenced by an attacker, use a different solution.

Converting HTML for Plain Text emailing keeping hyperlinks (a href) intact
The above function posted by hypoxide works fine, but I was after something that would basically convert HTML created in a Web RichText editor (for example FCKEditor) and clear out all HTML but leave all the Links due the fact that I wanted both the HTML and the plain text version to aid creating the correct parts to an STMP email (both HTML and plain text).
After a long time of searching Google myself and my collegues came up with this using the regex engine in Javascript:
str='this string has <i>html</i> code i want to <b>remove</b><br>Link Number 1 ->BBC Link Number 1<br><p>Now back to normal text and stuff</p>
';
str=str.replace(/<br>/gi, "\n");
str=str.replace(/<p.*>/gi, "\n");
str=str.replace(/<a.*href="(.*?)".*>(.*?)<\/a>/gi, " $2 (Link->$1) ");
str=str.replace(/<(?:.|\s)*?>/g, "");
the str variable starts out like this:
this string has <i>html</i> code i want to <b>remove</b><br>Link Number 1 ->BBC Link Number 1<br><p>Now back to normal text and stuff</p>
and then after the code has run it looks like this:-
this string has html code i want to remove
Link Number 1 -> BBC (Link->http://www.bbc.co.uk) Link Number 1
Now back to normal text and stuff
As you can see the all the HTML has been removed and the Link have been persevered with the hyperlinked text is still intact. Also I have replaced the <p> and <br> tags with \n (newline char) so that some sort of visual formatting has been retained.
To change the link format (eg. BBC (Link->http://www.bbc.co.uk) ) just edit the $2 (Link->$1), where $1 is the href URL/URI and the $2 is the hyperlinked text. With the links directly in body of the plain text most SMTP Mail Clients convert these so the user has the ability to click on them.
Hope you find this useful.

An improvement to the accepted answer.
function strip(html)
{
var tmp = document.implementation.createHTMLDocument("New").body;
tmp.innerHTML = html;
return tmp.textContent || tmp.innerText || "";
}
This way something running like this will do no harm:
strip("<img onerror='alert(\"could run arbitrary JS here\")' src=bogus>")
Firefox, Chromium and Explorer 9+ are safe.
Opera Presto is still vulnerable.
Also images mentioned in the strings are not downloaded in Chromium and Firefox saving http requests.

This should do the work on any Javascript environment (NodeJS included).
const text = `
<html lang="en">
<head>
<style type="text/css">*{color:red}</style>
<script>alert('hello')</script>
</head>
<body><b>This is some text</b><br/><body>
</html>`;
// Remove style tags and content
text.replace(/<style[^>]*>.*<\/style>/gm, '')
// Remove script tags and content
.replace(/<script[^>]*>.*<\/script>/gm, '')
// Remove all opening, closing and orphan HTML tags
.replace(/<[^>]+>/gm, '')
// Remove leading spaces and repeated CR/LF
.replace(/([\r\n]+ +)+/gm, '');

I altered Jibberboy2000's answer to include several <BR /> tag formats, remove everything inside <SCRIPT> and <STYLE> tags, format the resulting HTML by removing multiple line breaks and spaces and convert some HTML-encoded code into normal. After some testing it appears that you can convert most of full web pages into simple text where page title and content are retained.
In the simple example,
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<!--comment-->
<head>
<title>This is my title</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<style>
body {margin-top: 15px;}
a { color: #D80C1F; font-weight:bold; text-decoration:none; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<center>
This string has <i>html</i> code i want to <b>remove</b><br>
In this line BBC with link is mentioned.<br/>Now back to "normal text" and stuff using <html encoding>
</center>
</body>
</html>
becomes
This is my title
This string has html code i want to remove
In this line BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk) with link is mentioned.
Now back to "normal text" and stuff using
The JavaScript function and test page look this:
function convertHtmlToText() {
var inputText = document.getElementById("input").value;
var returnText = "" + inputText;
//-- remove BR tags and replace them with line break
returnText=returnText.replace(/<br>/gi, "\n");
returnText=returnText.replace(/<br\s\/>/gi, "\n");
returnText=returnText.replace(/<br\/>/gi, "\n");
//-- remove P and A tags but preserve what's inside of them
returnText=returnText.replace(/<p.*>/gi, "\n");
returnText=returnText.replace(/<a.*href="(.*?)".*>(.*?)<\/a>/gi, " $2 ($1)");
//-- remove all inside SCRIPT and STYLE tags
returnText=returnText.replace(/<script.*>[\w\W]{1,}(.*?)[\w\W]{1,}<\/script>/gi, "");
returnText=returnText.replace(/<style.*>[\w\W]{1,}(.*?)[\w\W]{1,}<\/style>/gi, "");
//-- remove all else
returnText=returnText.replace(/<(?:.|\s)*?>/g, "");
//-- get rid of more than 2 multiple line breaks:
returnText=returnText.replace(/(?:(?:\r\n|\r|\n)\s*){2,}/gim, "\n\n");
//-- get rid of more than 2 spaces:
returnText = returnText.replace(/ +(?= )/g,'');
//-- get rid of html-encoded characters:
returnText=returnText.replace(/ /gi," ");
returnText=returnText.replace(/&/gi,"&");
returnText=returnText.replace(/"/gi,'"');
returnText=returnText.replace(/</gi,'<');
returnText=returnText.replace(/>/gi,'>');
//-- return
document.getElementById("output").value = returnText;
}
It was used with this HTML:
<textarea id="input" style="width: 400px; height: 300px;"></textarea><br />
<button onclick="convertHtmlToText()">CONVERT</button><br />
<textarea id="output" style="width: 400px; height: 300px;"></textarea><br />

var text = html.replace(/<\/?("[^"]*"|'[^']*'|[^>])*(>|$)/g, "");
This is a regex version, which is more resilient to malformed HTML, like:
Unclosed tags
Some text <img
"<", ">" inside tag attributes
Some text <img alt="x > y">
Newlines
Some <a
href="http://google.com">
The code
var html = '<br>This <img alt="a>b" \r\n src="a_b.gif" />is > \nmy<>< > <a>"text"</a'
var text = html.replace(/<\/?("[^"]*"|'[^']*'|[^>])*(>|$)/g, "");

from CSS tricks:
https://css-tricks.com/snippets/javascript/strip-html-tags-in-javascript/
const originalString = `
<div>
<p>Hey that's <span>somthing</span></p>
</div>
`;
const strippedString = originalString.replace(/(<([^>]+)>)/gi, "");
console.log(strippedString);

Another, admittedly less elegant solution than nickf's or Shog9's, would be to recursively walk the DOM starting at the <body> tag and append each text node.
var bodyContent = document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0];
var result = appendTextNodes(bodyContent);
function appendTextNodes(element) {
var text = '';
// Loop through the childNodes of the passed in element
for (var i = 0, len = element.childNodes.length; i < len; i++) {
// Get a reference to the current child
var node = element.childNodes[i];
// Append the node's value if it's a text node
if (node.nodeType == 3) {
text += node.nodeValue;
}
// Recurse through the node's children, if there are any
if (node.childNodes.length > 0) {
appendTextNodes(node);
}
}
// Return the final result
return text;
}

If you want to keep the links and the structure of the content (h1, h2, etc) then you should check out TextVersionJS You can use it with any HTML, although it was created to convert an HTML email to plain text.
The usage is very simple. For example in node.js:
var createTextVersion = require("textversionjs");
var yourHtml = "<h1>Your HTML</h1><ul><li>goes</li><li>here.</li></ul>";
var textVersion = createTextVersion(yourHtml);
Or in the browser with pure js:
<script src="textversion.js"></script>
<script>
var yourHtml = "<h1>Your HTML</h1><ul><li>goes</li><li>here.</li></ul>";
var textVersion = createTextVersion(yourHtml);
</script>
It also works with require.js:
define(["textversionjs"], function(createTextVersion) {
var yourHtml = "<h1>Your HTML</h1><ul><li>goes</li><li>here.</li></ul>";
var textVersion = createTextVersion(yourHtml);
});

const htmlParser= new DOMParser().parseFromString("<h6>User<p>name</p></h6>" , 'text/html');
const textString= htmlParser.body.textContent;
console.log(textString)

A lot of people have answered this already, but I thought it might be useful to share the function I wrote that strips HTML tags from a string but allows you to include an array of tags that you do not want stripped. It's pretty short and has been working nicely for me.
function removeTags(string, array){
return array ? string.split("<").filter(function(val){ return f(array, val); }).map(function(val){ return f(array, val); }).join("") : string.split("<").map(function(d){ return d.split(">").pop(); }).join("");
function f(array, value){
return array.map(function(d){ return value.includes(d + ">"); }).indexOf(true) != -1 ? "<" + value : value.split(">")[1];
}
}
var x = "<span><i>Hello</i> <b>world</b>!</span>";
console.log(removeTags(x)); // Hello world!
console.log(removeTags(x, ["span", "i"])); // <span><i>Hello</i> world!</span>

For easier solution, try this => https://css-tricks.com/snippets/javascript/strip-html-tags-in-javascript/
var StrippedString = OriginalString.replace(/(<([^>]+)>)/ig,"");

It is also possible to use the fantastic htmlparser2 pure JS HTML parser. Here is a working demo:
var htmlparser = require('htmlparser2');
var body = '<p><div>This is </div>a <span>simple </span> <img src="test"></img>example.</p>';
var result = [];
var parser = new htmlparser.Parser({
ontext: function(text){
result.push(text);
}
}, {decodeEntities: true});
parser.write(body);
parser.end();
result.join('');
The output will be This is a simple example.
See it in action here: https://tonicdev.com/jfahrenkrug/extract-text-from-html
This works in both node and the browser if you pack your web application using a tool like webpack.

I made some modifications to original Jibberboy2000 script
Hope it'll be usefull for someone
str = '**ANY HTML CONTENT HERE**';
str=str.replace(/<\s*br\/*>/gi, "\n");
str=str.replace(/<\s*a.*href="(.*?)".*>(.*?)<\/a>/gi, " $2 (Link->$1) ");
str=str.replace(/<\s*\/*.+?>/ig, "\n");
str=str.replace(/ {2,}/gi, " ");
str=str.replace(/\n+\s*/gi, "\n\n");

After trying all of the answers mentioned most if not all of them had edge cases and couldn't completely support my needs.
I started exploring how php does it and came across the php.js lib which replicates the strip_tags method here: http://phpjs.org/functions/strip_tags/

function stripHTML(my_string){
var charArr = my_string.split(''),
resultArr = [],
htmlZone = 0,
quoteZone = 0;
for( x=0; x < charArr.length; x++ ){
switch( charArr[x] + htmlZone + quoteZone ){
case "<00" : htmlZone = 1;break;
case ">10" : htmlZone = 0;resultArr.push(' ');break;
case '"10' : quoteZone = 1;break;
case "'10" : quoteZone = 2;break;
case '"11' :
case "'12" : quoteZone = 0;break;
default : if(!htmlZone){ resultArr.push(charArr[x]); }
}
}
return resultArr.join('');
}
Accounts for > inside attributes and <img onerror="javascript"> in newly created dom elements.
usage:
clean_string = stripHTML("string with <html> in it")
demo:
https://jsfiddle.net/gaby_de_wilde/pqayphzd/
demo of top answer doing the terrible things:
https://jsfiddle.net/gaby_de_wilde/6f0jymL6/1/

Here's a version which sorta addresses #MikeSamuel's security concern:
function strip(html)
{
try {
var doc = document.implementation.createDocument('http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml', 'html', null);
doc.documentElement.innerHTML = html;
return doc.documentElement.textContent||doc.documentElement.innerText;
} catch(e) {
return "";
}
}
Note, it will return an empty string if the HTML markup isn't valid XML (aka, tags must be closed and attributes must be quoted). This isn't ideal, but does avoid the issue of having the security exploit potential.
If not having valid XML markup is a requirement for you, you could try using:
var doc = document.implementation.createHTMLDocument("");
but that isn't a perfect solution either for other reasons.

I think the easiest way is to just use Regular Expressions as someone mentioned above. Although there's no reason to use a bunch of them. Try:
stringWithHTML = stringWithHTML.replace(/<\/?[a-z][a-z0-9]*[^<>]*>/ig, "");

Below code allows you to retain some html tags while stripping all others
function strip_tags(input, allowed) {
allowed = (((allowed || '') + '')
.toLowerCase()
.match(/<[a-z][a-z0-9]*>/g) || [])
.join(''); // making sure the allowed arg is a string containing only tags in lowercase (<a><b><c>)
var tags = /<\/?([a-z][a-z0-9]*)\b[^>]*>/gi,
commentsAndPhpTags = /<!--[\s\S]*?-->|<\?(?:php)?[\s\S]*?\?>/gi;
return input.replace(commentsAndPhpTags, '')
.replace(tags, function($0, $1) {
return allowed.indexOf('<' + $1.toLowerCase() + '>') > -1 ? $0 : '';
});
}

I just needed to strip out the <a> tags and replace them with the text of the link.
This seems to work great.
htmlContent= htmlContent.replace(/<a.*href="(.*?)">/g, '');
htmlContent= htmlContent.replace(/<\/a>/g, '');

The accepted answer works fine mostly, however in IE if the html string is null you get the "null" (instead of ''). Fixed:
function strip(html)
{
if (html == null) return "";
var tmp = document.createElement("DIV");
tmp.innerHTML = html;
return tmp.textContent || tmp.innerText || "";
}

A safer way to strip the html with jQuery is to first use jQuery.parseHTML to create a DOM, ignoring any scripts, before letting jQuery build an element and then retrieving only the text.
function stripHtml(unsafe) {
return $($.parseHTML(unsafe)).text();
}
Can safely strip html from:
<img src="unknown.gif" onerror="console.log('running injections');">
And other exploits.
nJoy!

const strip=(text) =>{
return (new DOMParser()?.parseFromString(text,"text/html"))
?.body?.textContent
}
const value=document.getElementById("idOfEl").value
const cleanText=strip(value)

With jQuery you can simply retrieving it by using
$('#elementID').text()

I have created a working regular expression myself:
str=str.replace(/(<\?[a-z]*(\s[^>]*)?\?(>|$)|<!\[[a-z]*\[|\]\]>|<!DOCTYPE[^>]*?(>|$)|<!--[\s\S]*?(-->|$)|<[a-z?!\/]([a-z0-9_:.])*(\s[^>]*)?(>|$))/gi, '');

simple 2 line jquery to strip the html.
var content = "<p>checking the html source </p><p>
</p><p>with </p><p>all</p><p>the html </p><p>content</p>";
var text = $(content).text();//It gets you the plain text
console.log(text);//check the data in your console
cj("#text_area_id").val(text);//set your content to text area using text_area_id

nodejs block html in socket.io messages [duplicate]

Is there an easy way to take a string of html in JavaScript and strip out the html?

If you're running in a browser, then the easiest way is just to let the browser do it for you...
function stripHtml(html)
{
let tmp = document.createElement("DIV");
tmp.innerHTML = html;
return tmp.textContent || tmp.innerText || "";
}
Note: as folks have noted in the comments, this is best avoided if you don't control the source of the HTML (for example, don't run this on anything that could've come from user input). For those scenarios, you can still let the browser do the work for you - see Saba's answer on using the now widely-available DOMParser.

myString.replace(/<[^>]*>?/gm, '');

Simplest way:
jQuery(html).text();
That retrieves all the text from a string of html.

I would like to share an edited version of the Shog9's approved answer.
As Mike Samuel pointed with a comment, that function can execute inline javascript code.
But Shog9 is right when saying "let the browser do it for you..."
so.. here my edited version, using DOMParser:
function strip(html){
let doc = new DOMParser().parseFromString(html, 'text/html');
return doc.body.textContent || "";
}
here the code to test the inline javascript:
strip("<img onerror='alert(\"could run arbitrary JS here\")' src=bogus>")
Also, it does not request resources on parse (like images)
strip("Just text <img src='https://assets.rbl.ms/4155638/980x.jpg'>")

As an extension to the jQuery method, if your string might not contain HTML (eg if you are trying to remove HTML from a form field)
jQuery(html).text();
will return an empty string if there is no HTML
Use:
jQuery('<p>' + html + '</p>').text();
instead.
Update:
As has been pointed out in the comments, in some circumstances this solution will execute javascript contained within html if the value of html could be influenced by an attacker, use a different solution.

Converting HTML for Plain Text emailing keeping hyperlinks (a href) intact
The above function posted by hypoxide works fine, but I was after something that would basically convert HTML created in a Web RichText editor (for example FCKEditor) and clear out all HTML but leave all the Links due the fact that I wanted both the HTML and the plain text version to aid creating the correct parts to an STMP email (both HTML and plain text).
After a long time of searching Google myself and my collegues came up with this using the regex engine in Javascript:
str='this string has <i>html</i> code i want to <b>remove</b><br>Link Number 1 ->BBC Link Number 1<br><p>Now back to normal text and stuff</p>
';
str=str.replace(/<br>/gi, "\n");
str=str.replace(/<p.*>/gi, "\n");
str=str.replace(/<a.*href="(.*?)".*>(.*?)<\/a>/gi, " $2 (Link->$1) ");
str=str.replace(/<(?:.|\s)*?>/g, "");
the str variable starts out like this:
this string has <i>html</i> code i want to <b>remove</b><br>Link Number 1 ->BBC Link Number 1<br><p>Now back to normal text and stuff</p>
and then after the code has run it looks like this:-
this string has html code i want to remove
Link Number 1 -> BBC (Link->http://www.bbc.co.uk) Link Number 1
Now back to normal text and stuff
As you can see the all the HTML has been removed and the Link have been persevered with the hyperlinked text is still intact. Also I have replaced the <p> and <br> tags with \n (newline char) so that some sort of visual formatting has been retained.
To change the link format (eg. BBC (Link->http://www.bbc.co.uk) ) just edit the $2 (Link->$1), where $1 is the href URL/URI and the $2 is the hyperlinked text. With the links directly in body of the plain text most SMTP Mail Clients convert these so the user has the ability to click on them.
Hope you find this useful.

An improvement to the accepted answer.
function strip(html)
{
var tmp = document.implementation.createHTMLDocument("New").body;
tmp.innerHTML = html;
return tmp.textContent || tmp.innerText || "";
}
This way something running like this will do no harm:
strip("<img onerror='alert(\"could run arbitrary JS here\")' src=bogus>")
Firefox, Chromium and Explorer 9+ are safe.
Opera Presto is still vulnerable.
Also images mentioned in the strings are not downloaded in Chromium and Firefox saving http requests.

This should do the work on any Javascript environment (NodeJS included).
const text = `
<html lang="en">
<head>
<style type="text/css">*{color:red}</style>
<script>alert('hello')</script>
</head>
<body><b>This is some text</b><br/><body>
</html>`;
// Remove style tags and content
text.replace(/<style[^>]*>.*<\/style>/gm, '')
// Remove script tags and content
.replace(/<script[^>]*>.*<\/script>/gm, '')
// Remove all opening, closing and orphan HTML tags
.replace(/<[^>]+>/gm, '')
// Remove leading spaces and repeated CR/LF
.replace(/([\r\n]+ +)+/gm, '');

I altered Jibberboy2000's answer to include several <BR /> tag formats, remove everything inside <SCRIPT> and <STYLE> tags, format the resulting HTML by removing multiple line breaks and spaces and convert some HTML-encoded code into normal. After some testing it appears that you can convert most of full web pages into simple text where page title and content are retained.
In the simple example,
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<!--comment-->
<head>
<title>This is my title</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<style>
body {margin-top: 15px;}
a { color: #D80C1F; font-weight:bold; text-decoration:none; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<center>
This string has <i>html</i> code i want to <b>remove</b><br>
In this line BBC with link is mentioned.<br/>Now back to "normal text" and stuff using <html encoding>
</center>
</body>
</html>
becomes
This is my title
This string has html code i want to remove
In this line BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk) with link is mentioned.
Now back to "normal text" and stuff using
The JavaScript function and test page look this:
function convertHtmlToText() {
var inputText = document.getElementById("input").value;
var returnText = "" + inputText;
//-- remove BR tags and replace them with line break
returnText=returnText.replace(/<br>/gi, "\n");
returnText=returnText.replace(/<br\s\/>/gi, "\n");
returnText=returnText.replace(/<br\/>/gi, "\n");
//-- remove P and A tags but preserve what's inside of them
returnText=returnText.replace(/<p.*>/gi, "\n");
returnText=returnText.replace(/<a.*href="(.*?)".*>(.*?)<\/a>/gi, " $2 ($1)");
//-- remove all inside SCRIPT and STYLE tags
returnText=returnText.replace(/<script.*>[\w\W]{1,}(.*?)[\w\W]{1,}<\/script>/gi, "");
returnText=returnText.replace(/<style.*>[\w\W]{1,}(.*?)[\w\W]{1,}<\/style>/gi, "");
//-- remove all else
returnText=returnText.replace(/<(?:.|\s)*?>/g, "");
//-- get rid of more than 2 multiple line breaks:
returnText=returnText.replace(/(?:(?:\r\n|\r|\n)\s*){2,}/gim, "\n\n");
//-- get rid of more than 2 spaces:
returnText = returnText.replace(/ +(?= )/g,'');
//-- get rid of html-encoded characters:
returnText=returnText.replace(/ /gi," ");
returnText=returnText.replace(/&/gi,"&");
returnText=returnText.replace(/"/gi,'"');
returnText=returnText.replace(/</gi,'<');
returnText=returnText.replace(/>/gi,'>');
//-- return
document.getElementById("output").value = returnText;
}
It was used with this HTML:
<textarea id="input" style="width: 400px; height: 300px;"></textarea><br />
<button onclick="convertHtmlToText()">CONVERT</button><br />
<textarea id="output" style="width: 400px; height: 300px;"></textarea><br />

var text = html.replace(/<\/?("[^"]*"|'[^']*'|[^>])*(>|$)/g, "");
This is a regex version, which is more resilient to malformed HTML, like:
Unclosed tags
Some text <img
"<", ">" inside tag attributes
Some text <img alt="x > y">
Newlines
Some <a
href="http://google.com">
The code
var html = '<br>This <img alt="a>b" \r\n src="a_b.gif" />is > \nmy<>< > <a>"text"</a'
var text = html.replace(/<\/?("[^"]*"|'[^']*'|[^>])*(>|$)/g, "");

from CSS tricks:
https://css-tricks.com/snippets/javascript/strip-html-tags-in-javascript/
const originalString = `
<div>
<p>Hey that's <span>somthing</span></p>
</div>
`;
const strippedString = originalString.replace(/(<([^>]+)>)/gi, "");
console.log(strippedString);

Another, admittedly less elegant solution than nickf's or Shog9's, would be to recursively walk the DOM starting at the <body> tag and append each text node.
var bodyContent = document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0];
var result = appendTextNodes(bodyContent);
function appendTextNodes(element) {
var text = '';
// Loop through the childNodes of the passed in element
for (var i = 0, len = element.childNodes.length; i < len; i++) {
// Get a reference to the current child
var node = element.childNodes[i];
// Append the node's value if it's a text node
if (node.nodeType == 3) {
text += node.nodeValue;
}
// Recurse through the node's children, if there are any
if (node.childNodes.length > 0) {
appendTextNodes(node);
}
}
// Return the final result
return text;
}

If you want to keep the links and the structure of the content (h1, h2, etc) then you should check out TextVersionJS You can use it with any HTML, although it was created to convert an HTML email to plain text.
The usage is very simple. For example in node.js:
var createTextVersion = require("textversionjs");
var yourHtml = "<h1>Your HTML</h1><ul><li>goes</li><li>here.</li></ul>";
var textVersion = createTextVersion(yourHtml);
Or in the browser with pure js:
<script src="textversion.js"></script>
<script>
var yourHtml = "<h1>Your HTML</h1><ul><li>goes</li><li>here.</li></ul>";
var textVersion = createTextVersion(yourHtml);
</script>
It also works with require.js:
define(["textversionjs"], function(createTextVersion) {
var yourHtml = "<h1>Your HTML</h1><ul><li>goes</li><li>here.</li></ul>";
var textVersion = createTextVersion(yourHtml);
});

const htmlParser= new DOMParser().parseFromString("<h6>User<p>name</p></h6>" , 'text/html');
const textString= htmlParser.body.textContent;
console.log(textString)

A lot of people have answered this already, but I thought it might be useful to share the function I wrote that strips HTML tags from a string but allows you to include an array of tags that you do not want stripped. It's pretty short and has been working nicely for me.
function removeTags(string, array){
return array ? string.split("<").filter(function(val){ return f(array, val); }).map(function(val){ return f(array, val); }).join("") : string.split("<").map(function(d){ return d.split(">").pop(); }).join("");
function f(array, value){
return array.map(function(d){ return value.includes(d + ">"); }).indexOf(true) != -1 ? "<" + value : value.split(">")[1];
}
}
var x = "<span><i>Hello</i> <b>world</b>!</span>";
console.log(removeTags(x)); // Hello world!
console.log(removeTags(x, ["span", "i"])); // <span><i>Hello</i> world!</span>

For easier solution, try this => https://css-tricks.com/snippets/javascript/strip-html-tags-in-javascript/
var StrippedString = OriginalString.replace(/(<([^>]+)>)/ig,"");

It is also possible to use the fantastic htmlparser2 pure JS HTML parser. Here is a working demo:
var htmlparser = require('htmlparser2');
var body = '<p><div>This is </div>a <span>simple </span> <img src="test"></img>example.</p>';
var result = [];
var parser = new htmlparser.Parser({
ontext: function(text){
result.push(text);
}
}, {decodeEntities: true});
parser.write(body);
parser.end();
result.join('');
The output will be This is a simple example.
See it in action here: https://tonicdev.com/jfahrenkrug/extract-text-from-html
This works in both node and the browser if you pack your web application using a tool like webpack.

I made some modifications to original Jibberboy2000 script
Hope it'll be usefull for someone
str = '**ANY HTML CONTENT HERE**';
str=str.replace(/<\s*br\/*>/gi, "\n");
str=str.replace(/<\s*a.*href="(.*?)".*>(.*?)<\/a>/gi, " $2 (Link->$1) ");
str=str.replace(/<\s*\/*.+?>/ig, "\n");
str=str.replace(/ {2,}/gi, " ");
str=str.replace(/\n+\s*/gi, "\n\n");

After trying all of the answers mentioned most if not all of them had edge cases and couldn't completely support my needs.
I started exploring how php does it and came across the php.js lib which replicates the strip_tags method here: http://phpjs.org/functions/strip_tags/

function stripHTML(my_string){
var charArr = my_string.split(''),
resultArr = [],
htmlZone = 0,
quoteZone = 0;
for( x=0; x < charArr.length; x++ ){
switch( charArr[x] + htmlZone + quoteZone ){
case "<00" : htmlZone = 1;break;
case ">10" : htmlZone = 0;resultArr.push(' ');break;
case '"10' : quoteZone = 1;break;
case "'10" : quoteZone = 2;break;
case '"11' :
case "'12" : quoteZone = 0;break;
default : if(!htmlZone){ resultArr.push(charArr[x]); }
}
}
return resultArr.join('');
}
Accounts for > inside attributes and <img onerror="javascript"> in newly created dom elements.
usage:
clean_string = stripHTML("string with <html> in it")
demo:
https://jsfiddle.net/gaby_de_wilde/pqayphzd/
demo of top answer doing the terrible things:
https://jsfiddle.net/gaby_de_wilde/6f0jymL6/1/

Here's a version which sorta addresses #MikeSamuel's security concern:
function strip(html)
{
try {
var doc = document.implementation.createDocument('http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml', 'html', null);
doc.documentElement.innerHTML = html;
return doc.documentElement.textContent||doc.documentElement.innerText;
} catch(e) {
return "";
}
}
Note, it will return an empty string if the HTML markup isn't valid XML (aka, tags must be closed and attributes must be quoted). This isn't ideal, but does avoid the issue of having the security exploit potential.
If not having valid XML markup is a requirement for you, you could try using:
var doc = document.implementation.createHTMLDocument("");
but that isn't a perfect solution either for other reasons.

I think the easiest way is to just use Regular Expressions as someone mentioned above. Although there's no reason to use a bunch of them. Try:
stringWithHTML = stringWithHTML.replace(/<\/?[a-z][a-z0-9]*[^<>]*>/ig, "");

Below code allows you to retain some html tags while stripping all others
function strip_tags(input, allowed) {
allowed = (((allowed || '') + '')
.toLowerCase()
.match(/<[a-z][a-z0-9]*>/g) || [])
.join(''); // making sure the allowed arg is a string containing only tags in lowercase (<a><b><c>)
var tags = /<\/?([a-z][a-z0-9]*)\b[^>]*>/gi,
commentsAndPhpTags = /<!--[\s\S]*?-->|<\?(?:php)?[\s\S]*?\?>/gi;
return input.replace(commentsAndPhpTags, '')
.replace(tags, function($0, $1) {
return allowed.indexOf('<' + $1.toLowerCase() + '>') > -1 ? $0 : '';
});
}

I just needed to strip out the <a> tags and replace them with the text of the link.
This seems to work great.
htmlContent= htmlContent.replace(/<a.*href="(.*?)">/g, '');
htmlContent= htmlContent.replace(/<\/a>/g, '');

The accepted answer works fine mostly, however in IE if the html string is null you get the "null" (instead of ''). Fixed:
function strip(html)
{
if (html == null) return "";
var tmp = document.createElement("DIV");
tmp.innerHTML = html;
return tmp.textContent || tmp.innerText || "";
}

A safer way to strip the html with jQuery is to first use jQuery.parseHTML to create a DOM, ignoring any scripts, before letting jQuery build an element and then retrieving only the text.
function stripHtml(unsafe) {
return $($.parseHTML(unsafe)).text();
}
Can safely strip html from:
<img src="unknown.gif" onerror="console.log('running injections');">
And other exploits.
nJoy!

const strip=(text) =>{
return (new DOMParser()?.parseFromString(text,"text/html"))
?.body?.textContent
}
const value=document.getElementById("idOfEl").value
const cleanText=strip(value)

With jQuery you can simply retrieving it by using
$('#elementID').text()

I have created a working regular expression myself:
str=str.replace(/(<\?[a-z]*(\s[^>]*)?\?(>|$)|<!\[[a-z]*\[|\]\]>|<!DOCTYPE[^>]*?(>|$)|<!--[\s\S]*?(-->|$)|<[a-z?!\/]([a-z0-9_:.])*(\s[^>]*)?(>|$))/gi, '');

simple 2 line jquery to strip the html.
var content = "<p>checking the html source </p><p>
</p><p>with </p><p>all</p><p>the html </p><p>content</p>";
var text = $(content).text();//It gets you the plain text
console.log(text);//check the data in your console
cj("#text_area_id").val(text);//set your content to text area using text_area_id

Why my regex is not working in react but working anywhere else (e.g. regex tester online)? [duplicate]

I am trying to remove all the html tags out of a string in Javascript.
Heres what I have... I can't figure out why its not working....any know what I am doing wrong?
<script type="text/javascript">
var regex = "/<(.|\n)*?>/";
var body = "<p>test</p>";
var result = body.replace(regex, "");
alert(result);
</script>
Thanks a lot!

Try this, noting that the grammar of HTML is too complex for regular expressions to be correct 100% of the time:
var regex = /(<([^>]+)>)/ig
, body = "<p>test</p>"
, result = body.replace(regex, "");
console.log(result);
If you're willing to use a library such as jQuery, you could simply do this:
console.log($('<p>test</p>').text());

This is an old question, but I stumbled across it and thought I'd share the method I used:
var body = '<div id="anid">some text</div> and some more text';
var temp = document.createElement("div");
temp.innerHTML = body;
var sanitized = temp.textContent || temp.innerText;
sanitized will now contain: "some text and some more text"
Simple, no jQuery needed, and it shouldn't let you down even in more complex cases.
Warning
This can't safely deal with user content, because it's vulnerable to script injections. For example, running this:
var body = '<img src=fake onerror=alert("dangerous")> Hello';
var temp = document.createElement("div");
temp.innerHTML = body;
var sanitized = temp.textContent || temp.innerText;
Leads to an alert being emitted.

This worked for me.
var regex = /( |<([^>]+)>)/ig
, body = tt
, result = body.replace(regex, "");
alert(result);

This is a solution for HTML tag and &nbsp etc and you can remove and add conditions
to get the text without HTML and you can replace it by any.
convertHtmlToText(passHtmlBlock)
{
str = str.toString();
return str.replace(/<[^>]*(>|$)| |‌|»|«|>/g, 'ReplaceIfYouWantOtherWiseKeepItEmpty');
}

Here is how TextAngular (WYSISYG Editor) is doing it. I also found this to be the most consistent answer, which is NO REGEX.
#license textAngular
Author : Austin Anderson
License : 2013 MIT
Version 1.5.16
// turn html into pure text that shows visiblity
function stripHtmlToText(html)
{
var tmp = document.createElement("DIV");
tmp.innerHTML = html;
var res = tmp.textContent || tmp.innerText || '';
res.replace('\u200B', ''); // zero width space
res = res.trim();
return res;
}

you can use a powerful library for management String which is undrescore.string.js
_('a link').stripTags()
=> 'a link'
_('a link<script>alert("hello world!")</script>').stripTags()
=> 'a linkalert("hello world!")'
Don't forget to import this lib as following :
<script src="underscore.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="underscore.string.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript"> _.mixin(_.str.exports())</script>

my simple JavaScript library called FuncJS has a function called "strip_tags()" which does the task for you — without requiring you to enter any regular expressions.
For example, say that you want to remove tags from a sentence - with this function, you can do it simply like this:
strip_tags("This string <em>contains</em> <strong>a lot</strong> of tags!");
This will produce "This string contains a lot of tags!".
For a better understanding, please do read the documentation at
GitHub FuncJS.
Additionally, if you'd like, please provide some feedback through the form. It would be very helpful to me!

For a proper HTML sanitizer in JS, see http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/wiki/JsHtmlSanitizer

<html>
<head>
<script type="text/javascript">
function striptag(){
var html = /(<([^>]+)>)/gi;
for (i=0; i < arguments.length; i++)
arguments[i].value=arguments[i].value.replace(html, "")
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<form name="myform">
<textarea class="comment" title="comment" name=comment rows=4 cols=40></textarea><br>
<input type="button" value="Remove HTML Tags" onClick="striptag(this.form.comment)">
</form>
</body>
</html>

The selected answer doesn't always ensure that HTML is stripped, as it's still possible to construct an invalid HTML string through it by crafting a string like the following.
"<<h1>h1>foo<<//</h1>h1/>"
This input will ensure that the stripping assembles a set of tags for you and will result in:
"<h1>foo</h1>"
additionally jquery's text function will strip text not surrounded by tags.
Here's a function that uses jQuery but should be more robust against both of these cases:
var stripHTML = function(s) {
var lastString;
do {
s = $('<div>').html(lastString = s).text();
} while(lastString !== s)
return s;
};

The way I do it is practically a one-liner.
The function creates a Range object and then creates a DocumentFragment in the Range with the string as the child content.
Then it grabs the text of the fragment, removes any "invisible"/zero-width characters, and trims it of any leading/trailing white space.
I realize this question is old, I just thought my solution was unique and wanted to share. :)
function getTextFromString(htmlString) {
return document
.createRange()
// Creates a fragment and turns the supplied string into HTML nodes
.createContextualFragment(htmlString)
// Gets the text from the fragment
.textContent
// Removes the Zero-Width Space, Zero-Width Joiner, Zero-Width No-Break Space, Left-To-Right Mark, and Right-To-Left Mark characters
.replace(/[\u200B-\u200D\uFEFF\u200E\u200F]/g, '')
// Trims off any extra space on either end of the string
.trim();
}
var cleanString = getTextFromString('<p>Hello world! I <em>love</em> <strong>JavaScript</strong>!!!</p>');
alert(cleanString);

If you want to do this with a library and are not using JQuery, the best JS library specifically for this purpose is striptags.
It is heavier than a regex (17.9kb), but if you need greater security than a regex can provide/don't care about the extra 17.6kb, then it's the best solution.

Like others have stated, regex will not work. Take a moment to read my article about why you cannot and should not try to parse html with regex, which is what you're doing when you're attempting to strip html from your source string.

Replace string with HTML equivalent. Apart from <a> tags

How could I go about replacing a string:
Hello my name is <a href='/max'>max</a>!
<script>alert("DANGEROUS SCRIPT INJECTION");</script>
with
Hello my name is <a href='/max'>max</a>!
<script>alert("DANGEROUS SCRIPT INJECTION");</script>
I can easily have all the <,> replaced with <,> with:
string = string.replace(/</g, "<").replace(/>/g, ">");
but I still want to be able to have <a> links.
I have also looked into preventing script injection with:
var html = $(string.bold());
html.find('script').remove();
But I want to be able to still read the script tags rather than them being removed.

One approach to this problem is to use a regular expression with a strict look-behind pattern that only allows anchors that follow a certain format very closely.
Let's say you want to only allow links that exactly follow this example:
text
and
text
Build a regular expression that matches only "<" characters that are not followed by this valid pattern (negative lookbehind):
<(?!a href="https?:\/\/\w[\w.-\/\?#]+">\w+<\/a>)
One problem with this regular expression is that if you match it against your entire string, the < will still match the closing a element (</a>), so if you replace every match with a < you will break the anchor after all.
You can allow all closing </a> tags by appending an alternative to the negative look-behind:
<(?!a href="https?:\/\/\w[\w.-\/\?#]+">\w+<\/a>|\/a>)
Perhaps someone else has a better solution for that sub-problem.
Here is the final string.replace:
string.replace(/<(?!a href="https?:\/\/\w[\w.-\/\?#]+">\w+<\/a>|\/a>)/g, '<');
Note: All these input checks must always be done on the server side, on the client side the check can simply be circumvented and you'll have malicious data sent to your server despite the check.

This code snippet should do the trick. You can add additional tag names you wish to let pass as HTML tags in the array allowedTagNames.
// input
var html = "Hello my name is <a href='/max'>max</a>! <script>alert('DANGEROUS SCRIPT INJECTION');</script>";
var allowedTagNames = ["a"];
// output
var processedHTML = "";
var processingStart = 0;
// this block finds the next tag and processes it
while (true) {
var tagStart = html.indexOf("<", processingStart);
if (tagStart === -1) { break; }
var tagEnd = html.indexOf(">", tagStart);
if (tagEnd === -1) { break; }
var tagNameStart = tagStart + 1;
if (html[tagNameStart] === "/") {
// for closing tags
++tagNameStart;
}
// we expect there to be either a whitespace or a > after the tagName
var tagNameEnd = html.indexOf(" ", tagNameStart);
if (tagNameEnd === -1 || tagNameEnd > tagEnd) {
tagNameEnd = tagEnd;
}
var tagName = html.slice(tagNameStart, tagNameEnd);
// copy in text which is between this tag and the end of last tag
processedHTML += html.slice(processingStart, tagStart);
if (allowedTagNames.indexOf(tagName) === -1) {
processedHTML += "<" + html.slice(tagStart + 1, tagEnd) + ">";
} else {
processedHTML += html.slice(tagStart, tagEnd + 1);
}
processingStart = tagEnd + 1;
}
// copy the rest of input which wasn't processed
processedHTML += html.slice(processingStart);
NOTE: it won't work if there's a < or > inside a property of a tag.
For example: <a href=">">

You can use capture groups and lookarounds in Regex to achieve this
string = string.replace(/<((?!a )[^>]*)>/g, "<$1>").replace(/<\/a>/g, "</a>");
The first part replaces all the HTML tags (except anchor start tags <a>) from <tag> to <tag> and the second part replaces all the altered anchor end tags(</a>) from </a> back to </a>

If you want to replace only the <script... tags, the following code will do the trick ( you can run it in browser console ) and all other tags will not be changed. In my sample I added an extra line just to demonstrate how it works with multiple <script... tags inside.
let s = "Hello my name is <a href='/max'>max</a>!<script>alert(\"DANGEROUS SCRIPT INJECTION\");</script>";
s += "Hello my name is <a href='/bob'>bob</a>!<script>alert(\"DANGEROUS SCRIPT INJECTION\");</script>";
s.match(/<script.*?<\/script>/g).forEach(scr => s = s.replace(scr, scr.replace(/</g, "<").replace(/>/g, ">")));
console.log(s);
// OUTPUT: Hello my name is <a href='/max'>max</a>!<script>alert("DANGEROUS SCRIPT INJECTION");</script>Hello my name is <a href='/bob'>bob</a>!<script>alert("DANGEROUS SCRIPT INJECTION");</script>

Inserting a newline into a pre tag (IE, Javascript)

In IE when I insert text into a <pre> tag the newlines are ignored:
<pre id="putItHere"></pre>
<script>
function putText() {
document.getElementById("putItHere").innerHTML = "first line\nsecond line";
}
</script>
Using \r\n instead of a plain \n does not work.
<br/> does work but inserts an extra blank line in FF, which is not acceptable for my purposes.

These quirksmode.org bug report and comments about innerHTML behaviour of Internet Explorer could help:
"IE applies HTML normalization to the data that is assigned to the innerHTML property. This causes incorrect display of whitespace in elements that ought to preserve formatting, such as <pre> and <textarea>."

Does this work in IE?
document.getElementById("putItHere")
.appendChild(document.createTextNode("first line\nsecond line"));
I tested it with Firefox and it works. :-)

The workaround can be found in the page linked to in the accepted answer. For ease of use here it is:
if (elem.tagName == "PRE" && "outerHTML" in elem)
{
elem.outerHTML = "<PRE>" + str + "</PRE>";
}
else
{
elem.innerHTML = str;
}

<br/> shoud only output one line in all browsers. Of course remove the \n as well, code should be:
document.getElementById("putItHere").innerHTML = "first line<br/>second line";

Content inside the <pre> tag should not be considered HTML.
In fact, the point of <pre> tag is so that it does display formatted text.
Using the innerText property is the correct way to modify the content of a <pre> tag.
document.getElementById("putItHere").innerText = "first line\nsecond line";

IE9 does not normalize white spaces, unlike its predecessors.
You should test for support rather than targeting any specific browser. E.g...
var t = document.createElement(elem.tagName);
t.innerHTML = "\n";
if( t.innerHTML === "\n" ){
elem.innerHTML = str;
}
else if("outerHTML" in elem)
{
elem.outerHTML = "<"+elem.tagName+">" + str + "</"+elem.tagName+">";
}
else {
// fallback of your choice, probably do the first one.
}

I reckon this.
What I found was IE is using \r\n and Fx(others) is using \n
var newline;
if ( document.all ) newline = '\r\n';
else newline = '\n';
var data = 'firstline' + newline + 'second line';
document.getElementById("putItHere").appendChild(document.createTextNode(data));
For a TinyMCE(wysiwyg editor) plugin I once made I ended up with using BR i edit mode
and cleaned it up on submit etc.
This code loops through all BR elements inside PRE elements and replaces BR with newlines.
Note that the code relies on the TinyMCE API, but can easily be written using standard Javascript.
Clean up:
var br = ed.dom.select('pre br');
for (var i = 0; i < br.length; i++) {
var nlChar;
if (tinymce.isIE)
nlChar = '\r\n';
else
nlChar = '\n';
var nl = ed.getDoc().createTextNode(nlChar);
ed.dom.insertAfter(nl, br[i]);
ed.dom.remove(br[i]);
}
Good luck!

If you don't want to use outerHTML, you can also do the following for IE, if an additional pre tag is not an issue:
if(isIE)
document.getElementById("putItHere").innerHTML = "<pre>" + content+"</pre>";
else
document.getElementById("putItHere").innerHTML = content;

I've found that innerHTML is processed before it is applied to the element, hence <br> becomes a newline and multiple white spaces are removed.
To preserve the raw text you must use nodeValue, for example;
document.getElementById('pre_id').firstChild.nodeValue=' white space \r\n ad new line';

Here is a very small tweak to Edward Wilde's answer that preserves the attributes on the <pre> tag.
if (elem.tagName == "PRE" && "outerHTML" in elem) {
var outer = elem.outerHTML;
elem.outerHTML = outer.substring(0, outer.indexOf('>') + 1) + str + "</PRE>";
}
else {
elem.innerHTML = str;
}

if (typeof div2.innerText == 'undefined')
div2.innerHTML = value;
else
div2.innerText = value;
that worked for me.