Removing Characters Contained in HTML Tags

[Kevitto]

Good afternoon,

I was wondering if there was a simple way of removing everything that is contained between the '<' and '>' characters in a string.

I'm using AutoIT to pull information from HTML files and I need any tags removed.

Example:

<br /><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic;">(téléchargement manuel ou guide de référence)</span> 

I have to strip out everything contained in <> tags.

But the StringReplace function can't help me, because the tags are different depending on the content.  I run about 4,000 files through the script.

Any help is appreciated!

PS:  I'm not including my full code because there are waaaaaaay too many functions in there not relating to this.  I just need to find a way to strip the strings of all tags and their content.

[Melba23]

Kevitto,

Just what RegExes are designed for:

$sString = '<br /><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic;">(téléchargement manuel ou guide de référence)</span> '

$sStripped = StringRegExpReplace($sString, "(?U)(<.*>)", "")

ConsoleWrite($sStripped & @CRLF)

Decode:

(?U)     - Not greedy - look for smallest match
(<.*>)   - Look for anything between <>

""       - Replace any found strings with an empty string

All clear?

M23

[Kevitto]

Sir, you are a gentleman and a scholar. 

I've spent a lot of time trying to understand Regexp properly and it always eludes me.

Thank you so much!  Marking as Solved.

[MaxG]

Kevitto,

I found regular expressions rather cryptic and this site helped me understand them better than any other:

http://regexone.com/

It is interactive, progresses from basic to complicated smoothly, and made all the difference to my understanding.

[Kevitto]

Thank you, MaxG!  Will definitely check it out.

[Jury]

As someone else once pointed out why not this from the helpfile?

; Open a browser with the basic example, read the body Text
; (the content with all HTML tags removed) and display it in a MsgBox

#include <IE.au3>
#include <MsgBoxConstants.au3>

Local $oIE = _IECreate("http://www.pri.org/about-pri")
Local $sText = _IEBodyReadText($oIE)
ConsoleWrite($sText & @CRLF)
_IEQuit($oIE)

 or I'm I missing something?

 

[Kevitto]

As someone else once pointed out why not this from the helpfile?

; Open a browser with the basic example, read the body Text
; (the content with all HTML tags removed) and display it in a MsgBox

#include <IE.au3>
#include <MsgBoxConstants.au3>

Local $oIE = _IECreate("http://www.pri.org/about-pri")
Local $sText = _IEBodyReadText($oIE)
ConsoleWrite($sText & @CRLF)
_IEQuit($oIE)

 or I'm I missing something?

 

In case you were wondering, I was looking for specific parts of the file (I was using FileReadLine to read line per line) because I was searching for specific tags with StringInStr.  I just wanted to strip all tags so I could convert the result to a _Date() format and use it to check the data against the current date.

So getting the whole body wouldn't have helped .