Question

I need a regular expression that can be used with replaceall to replace all the html tags with empty string except any variations of br to maintain the line breaks.

I found the following to replace all html tags
<\s*br\s*\[^>]

Answer 1

You might get some answers that claim to work.

Those answers might even work for the particular cases you try them against.

But know that regular expressions (which I’m fond of in general) are the wrong tool for the job in this case.

And as your project evolves and needs to cover more complex HTML inputs, the regular expression will get more and more convoluted, and there may well come a time when it simply cannot solve your problem anymore, period.

Do it the right way from the beginning. Use an HTML parser, not a regex.

For reference, here are some related SO posts:

• Regex to match all HTML tags except <p> and </p>
• Regex to replace all \n in a String, but no those inside [code] [/code] tag
• RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags – bobince says it much more thoroughly than I do (: