Question

I have a string vector which contains html tags e.g

  abc<-""welcome <span class=\"r\"><a href=\"abc\">abc</a></span> Have fun!""

I want to remove these tags and get follwing vector

e.g

       abc<-"welcome Have fun"

Answer 1

Try

> gsub("(<[^>]*>)","",abc)

what this says is ‘substitute every instance of < followed by anything that isnt a > up to a > with nothing”

You cant just do gsub("<.*>","",abc) because regexps are greedy, and the .* would match up to the last > in your text (and you’d lose the ‘abc’ in your example).

This solution might fail if you’ve got > in your tags – but is <foo class=">" > legal? Doubtless someone will come up with another answer that involves parsing the HTML with a heavyweight XML package.