How to remove HTML tags from a string using JavaScript ?
Last Updated :
10 Jan, 2025
Removing HTML tags from a string in JavaScript means stripping out the markup elements, leaving only the plain text content. This is typically done to sanitize user input or to extract readable text from HTML code, ensuring no unwanted tags remain in the string.
HTML tags come in two forms: opening tags and closing tags. Understanding this distinction is crucial when parsing and manipulating HTML content.
- Opening tag: It starts with a '<', followed by an HTML keyword, and ends with a '>'. <html>, <br>, <title> are some examples of HTML opening tags.
- Closing tag: It starts with a '</', followed by an HTML keyword, and ends with a '>'.</html>, </title> are examples of HTML closing tags.
Approach 1: Using replace() function
The replace() function, combined with regular expressions, can identify and remove HTML tags from a string. This method uses patterns to find tags, making it effective for quick, simple tag removal.
Example: In this example, the removeTags function strips HTML tags from a string using a regular expression. It returns the cleaned string, leaving only the text content without any HTML elements.
javascript
function removeTags(str) {
if ((str === null) || (str === ''))
return false;
else
str = str.toString();
// Regular expression to identify HTML tags in
// the input string. Replacing the identified
// HTML tag with a null string.
return str.replace(/(<([^>]+)>)/ig, '');
}
console.log(removeTags(
'<html>Welcome to GeeksforGeeks.</html>'));;
Output:
Welcome to GeeksforGeeks.
Approach 2 : Using .textContent property or .innerText property
Using the .textContent or .innerText properties involves creating a temporary DOM element, setting its .innerHTML to the HTML string, and then accessing .textContent or .innerText to extract plain text, effectively removing all HTML tags from the string.
Example: In this example we extracts and logs text content from an HTML string by setting the innerHTML of a created div element, then retrieving the text using textContent or innerText.
javascript
// HTML tags contain text
let html = "<p>A Computer Science "
+ "Portal for Geeks</p>";
let div = document.createElement("div");
div.innerHTML = html;
let text = div.textContent || div.innerText || "";
console.log(text)
Output:
A Computer Science Portal for Geeks
Approach 3: Using DOMParser to Parse and Extract Text Content
Using the DOMParser approach, you create a DOMParser instance to parse the HTML string into a DOM document. By accessing the parsed document’s `.textContent` from the body, you can extract the plain text, effectively stripping out all HTML tags.
Example: The function removeHTMLTags parses an HTML string into plain text by using DOMParser, extracting the text content, trimming whitespace, and returning it.
JavaScript
function removeHTMLTags(htmlString) {
// Create a new DOMParser instance
const parser = new DOMParser();
// Parse the HTML string
const doc = parser.parseFromString(htmlString, 'text/html');
// Extract text content
const textContent = doc.body.textContent || "";
// Trim whitespace
return textContent.trim();
}
const htmlString = "<p>Welcome to <strong>GeeksforGeeks</strong>.</p>";
const textContent = removeHTMLTags(htmlString);
console.log(textContent);
Output:
Welcome to GeeksforGeeks.
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