Question

PHP has strip_tags function which strips HTML and PHP tags from a string.

Does Android have a way to escape html?

Answer 1

The solutions in the answer linked to by @sparkymat generally require either regex – which is an error-prone approach – or installing a third-party library such as jsoup or jericho. A better solution on Android devices is just to make use of the Html.fromHtml() function:

public String stripHtml(String html) {
    if (android.os.Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= android.os.Build.VERSION_CODES.N) {
       return Html.fromHtml(html, Html.FROM_HTML_MODE_LEGACY).toString();
    } else {
       return Html.fromHtml(html).toString();
    }
}

This uses Android’s built in Html parser to build a Spanned representation of the input html without any html tags. The “Span” markup is then stripped by converting the output back into a string.

As discussed here, Html.fromHtml behaviour has changed since Android N. See the documentation for more info.