Installation
Quick Take
Examples
- Ignores code tags and their contents
- A Bypass Callback and a Do-Nothing Callback
- Extract HTML
<head>contents - Just deletes inline tags
- Retain href and link label
- Leave only HTML
- Leave only opening
tdtags - Leave only
tdtags - Minimal example using Ranges
- Remove all HTML from a string
- Strip HTML from a raw JSON string
- Set the title case using
titlepackage - Widow word removal from text within HTML
Features
- Attempts to format the output nicely.
- Full control using a callback if needed.
- Removes tag pairs along with the content inside (handy for
script). - Works on HTML mixed with other languages (because it does not parse).
- Works on broken, partial, incomplete, non-valid HTML.
- Can be used to generate Email Text versions. Puts URL links.
- Enabled-by-default but optional Recursive HTML Decoding — nothing will escape!
- It won't strip templating tags (like JSP).
PS. We have stristri which also strips HTML. It can strip not only HTML but also CSS, text and templating tags. But it has less granular control over whitespace.
API - stripHtml()
The main function stripHtml() is imported like this:
It's a function which takes two input arguments:
| Input argument | Type | Obligatory? | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
input | String | yes | String to strip HTML tags from. |
opts | Plain object | no | Optional Options Object. |
The Optional Options Object has the following shape:
| An Optional Options Object's key | Type of its value | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
ignoreTags | Array of zero or more strings | [] | These tags will not be removed |
onlyStripTags | Array of zero or more strings | [] | If one or more tag names are given here, only these tags will be stripped, nothing else |
ignoreTagsWithTheirContents | Array of zero or more strings | [] | Opposite of stripTogetherWithTheirContents |
stripTogetherWithTheirContents | Array of zero or more strings, or something falsy | ['script', 'style', 'xml'] | These tags will be removed from the opening tag up to closing tag, including content in-between opening and closing tags. Set it to something falsy to turn it off. You can set it to ["*"] to include all tags. |
skipHtmlDecoding | Boolean | false | By default, all escaped HTML entities for example £ input will be recursively decoded before HTML-stripping. You can turn it off here if you don't need it. |
trimOnlySpaces | Boolean | false | Used mainly in automated setups. It ensures non-spaces are not trimmed from the outer edges of a string. |
stripRecognisedHTMLOnly | Boolean | false | Handy if you have HTML mixed with XML-like tags. |
dumpLinkHrefsNearby | Plain object or something falsy | false | Used to customise the output of link URL's: to enable the feature, also customise the URL location and wrapping. |
cb | Something falsy or a function | null | Gives you full control of the output and lets you tweak it. See the dedicated chapter below. |
Here are all defaults in one place for copying:
The function will return a plain object:
| Key's name | Key value's type | Description |
|---|---|---|
log | Plain object | For example, { timeTakenInMilliseconds: 6 } |
result | String | The string output where all ranges were applied to it. |
ranges | ranges: an array of one or more arrays containing from-to string index ranges OR null | For example, if characters from index 0 to 5 and 30 to 35 were deleted, that would be [[0, 5], [30, 35]]. Another example, if nothing was found, it would put here null. |
allTagLocations | Array of zero or more arrays | For example, [[0, 5], [30, 35]]. If you String.slice() each pair, you'll get HTML tag values. |
filteredTagLocations | Array of zero or more arrays | Only the tags that ended up stripped will be reported here. Takes into account opts.ignoreTags and opts.onlyStripTags, unlike allTagLocations above. For example, [[0, 5], [30, 35]]. |
Using Ranges from the output
The ranges from the output are compatible with range-ecosystem libraries, see example. Behind the scenes, this program actually operates on Ranges.
opts.trimOnlySpaces
Hi →Hi instead ofHi →Hi
In automated setups, a single string value can be split over multiple JSON paths. In those cases, joining spaces or non-breaking spaces are intended and often placed around the values. Normally, we would treat surrounding whitespace as a rogue, but not in these cases.
This setting allows us to distinguish between the two cases.
For example, imagine we "stitch" the sentence: Hi John! Welcome to our club. out of three pieces: Hi + John + ! + Welcome to our club.. In this case, spaces between the chunks would be added by your templating engine. Now, imagine, the text is of a quite large font-size, and there's a risk of words wrapping at wrong places. A client asks you to ensure that Hi and John are never split between the lines.
What do you do?
You remove the space between Hi and John from the template and move it to data-level. You hard-code the non-breaking space after Hi — Hi .
As you know, this library trims the input before returning it, and recursive HTML decoding is always on. On default settings, this library would remove your non-breaking space from Hi . That's where you need to set opts.trimOnlySpaces to true.
In this particular case, you can either turn off HTML decoding OR, even better, use this opts.trimOnlySpaces setting.
In either case, whitespace between the detected tags will still be aggressively trimmed - text <div>\n \t \r\n <br>\t \t \t</div> here → text here.
When this setting is on, only spaces will be trimmed from outside; an algorithm will stop at a first non-space character, in this case, non-breaking space:
" Hi! Please <div>shop now</div>! "
is turned into:
" Hi! Please shop now! "
Notice how space chunks between nbsp's and text are retained when opts.trimOnlySpaces is set to true. But the default is false; this feature is off by default.
opts.dumpLinkHrefsNearby
opts.dumpLinkHrefsNearby value is a plain object:
| opts.dumpLinkHrefsNearby key | default value | purpose |
|---|---|---|
| enabled | false | by default, this function is disabled - URL's are not inserted nearby. Set it to Boolean true to enable it. |
| putOnNewLine | false | By default, URL is inserted after any whatever was left after stripping the particular linked piece of code. If you want, you can force all inserted URL's to be on a new line, separated by a blank line. |
| wrapHeads | "" | This string (default is an empty string) will be inserted in front of every URL. Set it to any string you want, for example [. |
| wrapTails | "" | This string (default is an empty string) will be inserted straight after every URL. Set it to any string you want, for example ]. |
This feature is aimed at producing Text versions for promotional or transactional email campaigns.
If input string is has a linked text, URL will be put after it:
We watch both <a href="https://www.cnn.com" target="_blank">CNN</a> and
<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk" target="_blank">BBC</a>.
it's turned into:
We watch both CNN https://www.cnn.com and BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk.
But equally, any link on any tag, even one without text, will be retained:
Codsen
<div>
<a href="https://codsen.com" target="_blank"
><img
src="logo.png"
width="100"
height="100"
border="0"
style="display:block;"
alt="Codsen logo"
/></a>
</div>
it's turned into:
Codsen https://codsen.com
Setting opts.dumpLinkHrefsNearby is off by default; you need to turn it on, passing options object with a key opts.dumpLinkHrefsNearby set to true.
opts.onlyStripTags
Sometimes you want to strip only certain HTML tag or tags. It would be impractical to ignore all other known HTML tags and leave those you want. Option opts.onlyStripTags allows inverting the setting: whatever tags you list will be the only tags removed.
opts.onlyStripTags is an array. When a program starts, it will filter out any empty strings and strings that can be String.trim()'ed to a zero-length string. It's necessary because a presence on just one string in opts.onlyStripTags will switch this application to delete-only-these mode and it would be bad if empty, falsy or whitespace string value would accidentally cause it.
This option can work in combination with opts.ignoreTags. Any tags listed in opts.ignoreTags will be removed from the tags, listed in opts.onlyStripTags. If there was one or more tag listed in opts.onlyStripTags, the delete-only-these mode will be on and will be respected, even if there will be no tags to remove because all were excluded in opts.onlyStripTags.
opts.stripTogetherWithTheirContents
This program not only strips HTML and returns a string. It also returns string index locations of removals. This way, you can use this program to extract ranges of indexes which would later be used to skip operations on a string.
For example, npm package title capitalises the titles as per The Chicago Manual of Style. But if input source can contain HTML code, we need to skip processing the HTML tags.
The idea is, it sets opts.stripTogetherWithTheirContents to ["*"] — asterisk or wildcard meaning to "strip" all paired tags (including <code>/</code> in titles, for example). Then we take the locations of all tags and supplement it with locations of what's been whitelisted (using ranges-regex). Finally, we invert the ranges and supplement them with replacement value, third array element, coming from title. Here's the source code.
opts.cb
Sometimes you want more control over the program: maybe you want to strip only certain tags and write your custom conditions, maybe you want to do something extra on tags which are being ignored, for example, fix whitespace within them?
You can do it using opts.cb, passing a callback function. The idea is, once the program detects a truthy callback, it will stop performing the actions automatically. Instead, it will give you all the data: tag object with tag details, proposed deletion ranges, proposed string to insert and so on — then you must push the range yourself into rangesArr. If you don't push anything, that tag won't be deleted.
const cb = ({
tag,
deleteFrom,
deleteTo,
insert,
rangesArr,
proposedReturn,
}) => {
if (tag) {
// do something depending on what's in the current tag
console.log(JSON.stringify(tag, null, 4));
} else {
// default action which does nothing different from normal, non-callback operation
rangesArr.push(deleteFrom, deleteTo, insert);
// you might want to do something different, depending on "tag" contents.
}
};
const { result } = stripHtml("abc<hr>def", { cb });
console.log(result);
The tag key contains all the internal data for the particular tag which is being removed. Feel free to console.log(JSON.stringify(tag, null, 4)) it and tap its contents.
cb() example
The point of this callback interface is to pass the action of pushing of ranges to a user, as opposed to a program. The program will suggest you what it would push to final ranges array rangesArr, but it's up to you to perform the pushing.
Here's an example where the callback "does nothing" — it pushes what is proposed by default, proposedReturn.
From here, you can add more logic, conditionally push only certain ranges, tweak the ranges that get pushed and so on.
The tag key contains all the info program has gathered for currently stripped tag, it looks like this:
{
"attributes": [],
"slashPresent": false,
"leftOuterWhitespace": 3,
"onlyPlausible": false,
"nameStarts": 4,
"nameContainsLetters": true,
"nameEnds": 6,
"name": "hr",
"lastOpeningBracketAt": 3,
"lastClosingBracketAt": 6
}
For example, strict bracket-to-bracket range would be [tag.lastOpeningBracketAt, tag.lastClosingBracketAt + 1].
API - defaults
You can import defaults:
It's a plain object:
The main function calculates the options to be used by merging the options you passed with these defaults.
API - version
You can import version:
Algorithm
Speaking scientifically, it works from lexer-level, it's a scanerless parser.
In simple language, this program does not use parsing and AST trees. It processes the input string as text. Whatever the algorithm doesn't understand — errors, broken code, non-HTML, etc. — it skips.