How can I strip HTML in a string using Perl?

Question

Is there anyway easier than this to strip HTML from a string using Perl?

$Error_Msg =~ s|||ig;
$Error_Msg =~ s|||ig;
$Error_Msg =~ s|

        

Answer 1

From perlfaq9: How do I remove HTML from a string?

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The most correct way (albeit not the fastest) is to use HTML::Parser from CPAN. Another mostly correct way is to use HTML::FormatText which not only removes HTML but also attempts to do a little simple formatting of the resulting plain text.

Many folks attempt a simple-minded regular expression approach, like s/<.*?>//g, but that fails in many cases because the tags may continue over line breaks, they may contain quoted angle-brackets, or HTML comment may be present. Plus, folks forget to convert entities--like < for example.

Here's one "simple-minded" approach, that works for most files:

#!/usr/bin/perl -p0777
s/<(?:[^>'"]*|(['"]).*?\1)*>//gs

If you want a more complete solution, see the 3-stage striphtml program in http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/T/TO/TOMC/scripts/striphtml.gz .

Here are some tricky cases that you should think about when picking a solution:

<# Just data #>

>>>>>>>>>>> ]]>

If HTML comments include other tags, those solutions would also break on text like this: