How to strip HTML tags from string in JavaScript?
How can I strip the HTML from a string in JavaScript?
Answer
cleanText = strInputCode.replace(/<\/?[^>]+(>|$)/g, "");
Distilled from this website (web.achive).
This regex looks for <, an optional slash /, one or more characters that are not >, then either > or $ (the end of the line)
Examples:
'<div>Hello</div>' ==> 'Hello'
^^^^^ ^^^^^^
'Unterminated Tag <b' ==> 'Unterminated Tag '
^^
But it is not bulletproof:
'If you are < 13 you cannot register' ==> 'If you are '
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
'<div data="score > 42">Hello</div>' ==> ' 42">Hello'
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^
If someone is trying to break your application, this regex will not protect you. It should only be used if you already know the format of your input. As other knowledgable and mostly sane people have pointed out, to safely strip tags, you must use a parser.
If you do not have acccess to a convenient parser like the DOM, and you cannot trust your input to be in the right format, you may be better off using a package like sanitize-html, and also other sanitizers are available.