Remove HTML tags from a String

Question

Is there a good way to remove HTML from a Java string? A simple regex like

 replaceAll("\\<.*?>","") 

will work, but things like &amp; won't be converted correctly and non-HTML between the two angle brackets will be removed (i.e. the .*? in the regex will disappear).

Answer 1

Use an HTML parser rather than regex. This is lifeless simple with Jsoup.

public static String html2text(String html) {

    return Jsoup.parse(html).text();

}

Jsoup also recommends removing HTML tags upon a customizable whitelist, which is very helpful if you require to provide only e.g. <b>, <i> and <u>.