How can I strip HTML tags from a string in ASP.NET?

Question

If it is just stripping all HTML tags from a string, this works reliably with regex as well. Replace:

<[^>]*(>|$)

with the empty string, globally. Don't forget to normalize the string afterwards, replacing:

[\s\r\n]+

with a single space, and trimming the result. Optionally replace any HTML character entities back to the actual characters.

Note:

1. There is a limitation: HTML and XML allow > in attribute values. This solution will return broken markup when encountering such values.
2. The solution is technically safe, as in: The result will never contain anything that could be used to do cross site scripting or to break a page layout. It is just not very clean.
3. As with all things HTML and regex:
   Use a proper parser if you must get it right under all circumstances.

Go download HTMLAgilityPack, now! ;) Download LInk

This allows you to load and parse HTML. Then you can navigate the DOM and extract the inner values of all attributes. Seriously, it will take you about 10 lines of code at the maximum. It is one of the greatest free .net libraries out there.

Here is a sample:

            string htmlContents = new System.IO.StreamReader(resultsStream,Encoding.UTF8,true).ReadToEnd();

            HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument();
            doc.LoadHtml(htmlContents);
            if (doc == null) return null;

            string output = "";
            foreach (var node in doc.DocumentNode.ChildNodes)
            {
                output += node.InnerText;
            }

Regex.Replace(htmlText, "<.*?>", string.Empty);

protected string StripHtml(string Txt)
{
    return Regex.Replace(Txt, "<(.|\\n)*?>", string.Empty);
}    

Protected Function StripHtml(Txt as String) as String
    Return Regex.Replace(Txt, "<(.|\n)*?>", String.Empty)
End Function

I've posted this on the asp.net forums, and it still seems to be one of the easiest solutions out there. I won't guarantee it's the fastest or most efficient, but it's pretty reliable. In .NET you can use the HTML Web Control objects themselves. All you really need to do is insert your string into a temporary HTML object such as a DIV, then use the built-in 'InnerText' to grab all text that is not contained within tags. See below for a simple C# example:

System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlGenericControl htmlDiv = new System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlGenericControl("div");
htmlDiv.InnerHtml = htmlString;
String plainText = htmlDiv.InnerText;