Question

So I have an NSString which is basically an html string with all the usual html elements. The specific thing I would like to do is to just strip it from all the img tags.
The img tags may or may not have max-width, style or other attributes so I do not know their length up front. They always end with />

How could I do this?

EDIT: Based on nicolasthenoz‘s answer, I came up with a solution that requires less code:

NSString *HTMLTagss = @"<img[^>]*>"; //regex to remove img tag
NSString *stringWithoutImage = [htmlString stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfRegex:HTMLTagss withString:@""]; 

Answer 1

You can use the NSString method stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString with the NSRegularExpressionSearch option:

NSString *result = [html stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"<img[^>]*>" withString:@"" options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch | NSRegularExpressionSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [html length])];

Or you can also use the replaceMatchesInString method of NSRegularExpression. Thus, assuming you have your html in a NSMutableString *html, you can:

NSRegularExpression *regex = [NSRegularExpression regularExpressionWithPattern:@"<img[^>]*>"
                                                                       options:NSRegularExpressionCaseInsensitive
                                                                         error:nil];

[regex replaceMatchesInString:html
                      options:0
                        range:NSMakeRange(0, html.length)
                 withTemplate:@""];

I’d personally lean towards one of these options over the stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfRegex method of RegexKitLite. There’s no need to introduce a third-party library for something as simple as this unless there was some other compelling issue.