Strip tags with javascript and handle line breaks

Question

I want to strip tags from a html, but preserves it's line breaks.

I want the behaviour like copying the text in browser and pasting it in notepad.

For example, a code that converts:

• <div>x1</div><div>x2</div> to x1\nx2
• <p>x1</p><p>x2</p> to x1\nx2
• <b>x1</b><i>x2</i> to x1x2
• x1<br>x2 to x1\nx2

Removing all tags not works (/<.*?>/g). Also creating a dummy <div> and settings it's innertHTML and read it's textContent will remove line breaks.

Any Help?

Answer 1

How's this work for you? This will replace every occurrence of <br>, </div>, and </p> with a \n, and then strip the remaining tags. Its goofy, but its at least a start.

fixed = text_to_fix.replace(/<(?:br|\/div|\/p)>/g, "\n")
           .replace(/<.*?>/g, "");

This doesn't work for all HTML, however. Just the tags you mentioned.