How to clear tags from a string using JavaScript

Question

<div id="mydiv"> <p> <b><a href="mypage.html">This is an example<a>.</b> <br> This is another example. </p> </div> <script type="text/javascript"> var mystr = document.getElementById('mydiv').innerHTML; ..... </script> 

I want to clear all the tags and get the salt text,

 mystr = "This is an example this is another example."; 

How can i do this?

Answer 1

Using innerText and textContent :

 var element = document.getElementById('mydiv'); var mystr = element.innerText || element.textContent; 

• innerText supported by all browsers, but FF
• textContent supported by all browsers, but IE

Demo

I only saw that the string would still contain line breaks. You can remove them with replace :

 mystr = mystr.replace(/\n/g, ""); 

Update:

As @ Šime Vidas points out in his comment, it seems that you need to handle spaces a little differently to fix the line in IE:

 mystr = mystr.replace(/\s+/g, ' '); 

Answer 2

Here's another approach - remove tags using replace with regex:

 document.getElementById('mydiv').innerHTML.replace(/\n|<.*?>/g,'') 

Here is the fiddle

Answer 3

Try:

 document.getElementById('mydiv').innerText || document.getElementById('mydiv').textContent; 

Answer 4

You can scroll through all the children and read .innerText from them. Then you can easily concatenate the text from each child element and get all the text without tags.