Remove HTML markup from text in Azure Function app

Question

I am writing a simple Azure Function app that should receive a string containing HTML markup remove the HTML tags and return the "sanitized" text.

The code would be really simple, like

module.exports = async function (context, req) {
    if (req.body) {
        context.res = {
            body: req.body.replace(... something)
        };
    }
};

As far as I can see on SO, using RegEx to do this is a big NO-GO, but the other solutions I can find to this are all based on the DOM (working on the documentobject, like adding a DIV with the req.body contents in it and getting the clean text from that.

But in my Azure function, the DOM is not available to me (since there is no browser executing the request.

So what are my options?

Can you import node.js modules? There are several out there that can be used to parse the DOM - [jsdom](https://github.com/jsdom/jsdom) comes to mind, although I'm sure there are others. — Kryten, May 07 '19 at 19:10
Why not just install a library like sanitize-html or striptags? Azure functions allow that... — Carlos Alves Jorge, May 07 '19 at 19:13
@CarlosAlvesJorge oh ... did not know that. I found this on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45169066/azure-functions-import-custom-node-module . Thanks :) — Jesper Lund Stocholm, May 07 '19 at 21:23

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 13 '19 at 11:00

For the benefit of others coming across this, like Carlos and Kryten mentioned, you could use one of the many npm modules available for sanitizing text.

As for adding these dependencies (refer docs), you could either

When working locally, just npm install what you need and when using func to deploy, it will include node_modules too. This would help with cold starts since it runs the package as is. The same applies when using docker-based deployment too with the default Dockerfile.
Using Kudu as mentioned in the SO thread you've shared. But would not recommended this since its something you'll always have to do on changes in dependencies.

Remove HTML markup from text in Azure Function app

1 Answers1