Need regex for removing and html tag Asked Feb 06 '12 at 10:34 Active Feb 06 '12 at 12:28 Viewed 1,076 times 0 I am parsing an html file in C# and extracting the text from html. My html file has a lot of tags in it. Html file has select tag and option tag. I need a regex for removing the select tag and option tag from html file. I don't want this information. So I want to delete it using any regex. Below is the html that I want to remove from my html file: <select name="state" onchange="setCities();" id="state">> <option value="CA" selected="selected">CA</option> <option value="WA">WA</option> <option value="TX">TX</option> <option value="NV">NV</option> <option value="CO">CO</option> <option value="MI">MI</option> <option value="SC">SC</option> c# html regex edited Feb 06 '12 at 12:28 Toto 89,455 62 89 125 asked Feb 06 '12 at 10:34 Waseem Fastian 33 1 10 3 You DO NOT need regex for parsing HTML. – hsz Feb 06 '12 at 10:36 2 Just for fun: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 – Ray Feb 06 '12 at 10:37 Why so complicated? myHTMLString.Replace("", string.Empty); – Core_F Feb 06 '12 at 10:44 Get this; http://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com/ – Chris McAtackney Feb 06 '12 at 10:47 I have tried so far this regex Regex.Replace(input, @"]*)?>(]*)?>.*?]*)?>)*]*)?>", string.Empty); – Waseem Fastian Feb 06 '12 at 10:48

Answer 1

You don't need to use RegEx to simply strip the HTML tags. The following method iterates through the HTML code string and creates a new return string without any tags.
This way is faster than RegEx too.

public static string StripHTMLTags(string str)
    {
        char[] array = new char[str.Length];
        int arrayIndex = 0;
        bool inside = false;

        for (int i = 0; i < str.Length; i++)
        {
            char c = str[i];
            if (c == '<')
            {
                inside = true;
                continue;
            }
            if (c == '>')
            {
                inside = false;
                continue;
            }
            if (!inside)
            {
                array[arrayIndex] = c;
                arrayIndex++;
            }
        }
        return new string(array, 0, arrayIndex);
    }