Regex Problem

[Anubhav Anand]

Hello Ranchers,

I have a string of type:

    
String strData = "Hello <b>how</b> <i>are</i> <u>you</u> doing <a href=\"today.html\">today</a>?";

Precisely a string with many html tags embedded in it.

What i want out of it is, the simple string i.e. "Hello how are you doing today?" to display it on the screen.

I have tried multiple regex expressions and failed to get the output. Will be really glad if anybody could help me on this.

Thanks in advance.
[ August 28, 2008: Message edited by: Anubhav Anand ]

[Ulf Dittmer]

Which ones have you tried? How have they failed? The key will likely be to use non-greedy (or reluctant) quantifiers.

[Rob Spoor]

You could try using an HTML parser, and catch all text:

HTMLEditorKit.Parser parser = new ParserDelegator();
final StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
HTMLEditor.Callback cb = new HTMLEditorCallback()
{
    // ignore everything but the text
    public void handleText(char[] data, int pos)
    {
        builder.append(data);
    }
};
Reader reader = <create a reader for the contents, possibly with InputStreamReader>
parser.parse(reader, cb, true);
System.out.println(builder);

[Anubhav Anand]

To Ulf:

I had been trying various sets of regex expressions in split,replace and also using pattern and matcher classes. But, all the regex i used were stripping off the entire content between the first opening < and last closing >
e.g. i tried the regex : string.replace("<.*>","")

To Rob:
Thanks for the suggestion, seemed pretty cool, but I just came up with a solution. Thanks a lot for your time.

The solution that worked for me is:

 strData = strData.replaceAll("<[A-Za-z 0-9\\?\\+\\-_=\"'#*&\\$/();:.,\\?@~`!/]+>", ""); 

[ August 28, 2008: Message edited by: Anubhav Anand ]

[Henry Wong]

I had been trying various sets of regex expressions in split,replace and also using pattern and matcher classes. But, all the regex i used were stripping off the entire content between the first opening < and last closing >
e.g. i tried the regex : string.replace("<.*>","")

As Ulf suggested, perhaps you need to use a reluctant qualifier. e.g. String.replaceAll("<.*?>", "")

Henry

[Anubhav Anand]

Thanks Henry, for pin pointing that.
Amidst so many issues I just couldn't think much.

Thanks to all for the help..