Re: Stripping HTML tags

[Rici Lake <lua@...>]

(Please don't reply to messages when you're starting a new thread. It's 
confusing.)

On 15-Aug-05, at 2:44 PM, Florian Berger wrote:

> I thought that stripping HTML tags was easy until I saw something like 
> this:
> <a href="http://www.example.com"; alt="> example"> example </a>

That would be non-trivial to handle with a regular expression, although 
I think it is possible.

However, you would have quite a bit of trouble with some other 
legitimate HTML constructions, particularly comments (<!-- I left out 
the <p> tag here -->) and embedded javascript. If you want a 
bullet-proof html parser, you should probably use a tokenizer.

> > s = string.gsub(s, '<.->', ' ')

This might prove to be a bit faster, but it would fare no better with 
the alt=">.." example:

s = string.gsub(s, "%b<>", " ")

I'm not convinced by the substitution of a tag with a space, though. 
The following sequence is not rendered with a space: 
<b>over</b>-specified