regular expression to extract text from HTML

Question

I would like to extract from a general HTML page, all the text (displayed or not).

I would like to remove

• any HTML tags
• Any javascript
• Any CSS styles

Is there a regular expression (one or more) that will achieve that?

Answer 1

Remove javascript and CSS:

<(script|style).*?</\1>

Remove tags

<.*?>

Answer 2

You can't really parse HTML with regular expressions. It's too complex. RE's won't handle <![CDATA[ sections correctly at all. Further, some kinds of common HTML things like <text> will work in a browser as proper text, but might baffle a naive RE.

You'll be happier and more successful with a proper HTML parser. Python folks often use something Beautiful Soup to parse HTML and strip out tags and scripts.

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Also, browsers, by design, tolerate malformed HTML. So you will often find yourself trying to parse HTML which is clearly improper, but happens to work okay in a browser.

You might be able to parse bad HTML with RE's. All it requires is patience and hard work. But it's often simpler to use someone else's parser.