Question

I am receiving string from server having HTML tags. I am removing these tags using regular expression like string1.replaceAll("\\<.*?>","") but the problem is that it also remove line breaks and hyperlinks. I want to keep hyperlinks and line breaks and remove everything else.

Answer 1

Don’t use regexps for parsing HTML.

To strip it completely from HTML (not what you wanted, but simple to do):

String html = "<h1>I only want<br/>line breaks and " + 
    "<a href='http://stackoverflow.com'>links</a>, <i>not</i>" +
    " the <b>other</b> stuff";
String sansHtml = Html.fromHtml(html).toString();

To strip it selectively, retaining only <a> (and the href attribute) and <br> tags I suggest you use JSoup:

Whitelist whitelist = Whitelist.none().addTags("a", "br").addAttributes("a", "href");
String jsoupHtml = Jsoup.clean(html, whitelist);