ruby on rails regular expression to remove html tags and its content from text

Question

I want regular expression in ruby on rails which remove all the html tags and its content from the given text.

For example if my text is :-INPUT :-

<span id="span_is"><br><br><u><i>Hi</i></u></span> 

then it should display only OUTPUT should be as follows:-

Hi

in short i want regular expression or a function which remove <> and whatever the content between <>.

Thanks & Regards,

Salil Gaikwad

Answer 1

'<span id="span_is"><br><br><u><i>Hi</i></u></span>'.gsub(/<\/?[^>]+>/, '')

Answer 2

Your string is quite simple and that solution might work. However, you shouldn't reinvent the wheel. Rails already includes some powerful sanitization helpers.

string = '<span id="span_is"><br><br><u><i>Hi</i></u></span>'
strip_tags(string)

Answer 3

Don't do this. Please.

While your sample-input is fairly trivial, you mention that you want to use it in a lot broader scope.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/11/parsing-html-the-cthulhu-way.html

For Ruby, you can try using http://hpricot.com/ to parse HTML instead.