How to strip out HTML tags from a string using JavaScript ?

Last Updated : 15 Dec, 2023

To strip out all the HTML tags from a string there are lots of procedures in JavaScript. In order to strip out tags we can use the replace() function and can also use .textContent property, .innerText property from HTML DOM. HTML tags are of two types opening tag and closing tag.

Opening tag: It starts with a ‘<‘, followed by an HTML keyword, and ends with a ‘>‘. <html>, <br>, <title> are some examples of HTML opening tags.
Closing tag: It starts with a ‘</‘, followed by an HTML keyword, and ends with a ‘>‘.</html>, </title> are examples of HTML closing tags.

Table of Content

Using replace() function
Using .textContent property or .innerText property

Approach 1: Using replace() function

The ‘<‘, ‘</’, ‘>’, can be used to identify a word as an HTML tag in a string. The following examples show how to strip out HTML tags using replace() function and a regular expression, which identifies an HTML tag in the input string. A regular expression is a better way to find the HTML tags and remove them easily.

Example: In this example we will strip out HTML tag with above method..

javascript

function removeTags(str) {
    if ((str === null) || (str === ''))
        return false;
    else
        str = str.toString();
 
    // Regular expression to identify HTML tags in
    // the input string. Replacing the identified
    // HTML tag with a null string.
    return str.replace(/(<([^>]+)>)/ig, '');
}
console.log(removeTags(
    '<html>Welcome to GeeksforGeeks.</html>'));;

Output:

Welcome to GeeksforGeeks.

Approach 2 : Using .textContent property or .innerText property

The .textContent property returns the text content of the specified node and all its descendants. The .innerText property does the same thing as the .textContent property.

Example: In this example we will strip out HTML tag with above method.

javascript

// HTML tags contain text
let html = "<p>A Computer Science "
    + "Portal for Geeks</p>";
let div = document.createElement("div");
div.innerHTML = html;
let text = div.textContent || div.innerText || "";
console.log(text)