Current Perl documentation can be found at perldoc.perl.org.
Here is our local, out-dated (pre-5.6) version:
The most correct way (albeit not the fastest) is to use HTML::Parse from CPAN (part of the libwww-perl distribution, which is a must-have module for all web hackers).
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.perl.com/CPAN/authors/Tom_Christiansen/scripts/striphtml.gz .
Here are some tricky cases that you should think about when picking a solution:
<IMG SRC = "foo.gif" ALT = "A > B">
<IMG SRC = "foo.gif" ALT = "A > B">
<!-- <A comment> -->
<script>if (a<b && a>c)</script>
<# Just data #>
<![INCLUDE CDATA [ >>>>>>>>>>>> ]]>
If HTML comments include other tags, those solutions would also break on text like this:
<!-- This section commented out. <B>You can't see me!</B> -->