How to remove HTML tags from textarea with JavaScript

Question

I'm loading text from database but I'd like to remove html link code from it with JavaScript.

So lets say the textarea right now displays:

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://stackoverflow.com//questions/ask">http://stackoverflow.com//questions/ask</a> - good page 

and I want it to display:

http://stackoverflow.com//questions/ask - good page

Is there something lightweight I could use that would work for multiple links in the same textarea?

Answer 1

Inspired by this answer, use the browser's HTML parsing abilities to get this done right.

function strip(html)
{
   var tmp = document.createElement("DIV");
   tmp.innerHTML = html;
   return tmp.textContent||tmp.innerText;
}
jQuery('#textareaid').text(function(index, text){
 return strip(text);
});

Here's the JSFiddle of it working: http://jsfiddle.net/Au95R/1/

(Edited to use cleaner JS)