Question

Looking at “In jQuery, want to remove all HTML inside of a div“, I got going in the right direction to what I’m looking for:

I have a textarea similar to the following:

<textarea id="inputPane" cols="80" rows="40" class="pane" style="height:300px;">
<table><tr><td>
 <b>Since your service bureau</b>, xxx is not certified 
 by our company for xyz, your company will need to complete 
 more testing as part of the process.
</td></tr></table>
</textarea> 

Using this code from the URL listed above, I’m able to remove all whitespace apparently, but am unable to remove the actual HTML tags: <b></b>, <table>, etc.

jQuery.fn.stripTags = function() 
{ return this.replaceWith( this.html().replace(/<\/?[^>]+>/gi, '') ); };

What is this part saying?

/<\/?[^>]+>/gi

I think it reads:

• remove this character <
• and remove this character >
• and replace with nothing.

Although this is not what it is doing in my code. It seems to strip all the whitespace from the DIV I put it on.

What is the gi part?
And, would you have a good solution to remove HTML tags from a wmd-editor textarea when the HTML displayed is coming from a database?

Answer 1

I use the following script to remove html tags from a string-

 function removeHTMLTags(htmlString)
 {
    if(htmlString)
    {
      var mydiv = document.createElement("div");
       mydiv.innerHTML = htmlString;

        if (document.all) // IE Stuff
        {
            return mydiv.innerText;
        }   
        else // Mozilla does not work with innerText
        {
            return mydiv.textContent;
        }                           
    }
 }  

not exactly sure but i think /gi part indicates global replace like in string.replace in JavaScript.