Sed remove tags from html file

Question

I need to remove all tags from a html with a bash script using the sed command. I tried with this

sed -r 's/[\<][\/]?[a-zA-Z0-9\=\"\-\#\.\& ]+[\/]?[\>]//g' $1 

and whith this

sed -r 's/[\<][\/]?[.]*[\/]?[\\]?[\>]//g' $1 

but I still miss something, any suggestions??

Answer 1

You can either use one of the many HTML to text converters, use Perl regex if possible <.+?> or if it must be sed use <[^>]*>

sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g' file.html 

If there's no room for errors, use an HTML parser instead. E.g. when an element is spread over two lines

<div >Lorem ipsum</div> 

this regular expression will not work.

---

This regular expression consists of three parts <, [^>]*, >

• search for opening <
• followed by zero or more characters *, which are not the closing >
[...] is a character class, when it starts with ^ look for characters not in the class
• and finally look for closing >

The simpler regular expression <.*> will not work, because it searches for the longest possible match, i.e. the last closing > in an input line. E.g., when you have more than one tag in an input line

<name>Olaf</name> answers questions. 

will result in

answers questions.

instead of

Olaf answers questions.

See also Repetition with Star and Plus, especially section Watch Out for The Greediness! and following, for a detailed explanation.