How I can remove characters between < and > using regex in c#?

Question

I have a string str="<u>rag</u>" . Now, i want to get the string "rag" only. How can I get it using regex?

My code is here..

I got the output=""

Thanks in advance..

C# code:

string input="<u>ragu</u>";
string regex = "(\\<.*\\>)";
string output = Regex.Replace(input, regex, "");

Answer 1

const string HTML_TAG_PATTERN = "<.*?>";
Regex.Replace (str, HTML_TAG_PATTERN, string.Empty);

Answer 2

Using regex for parsing html is not recommended

regex is used for regularly occurring patterns. html is not regular with it's format(except xhtml ).For example html files are valid even if you don't have a closing tag !This could break your code.

Use an html parser like htmlagilitypack

---

WARNING {Don't try this in your code}

To solve your regex problem!

<.*> replaces < followed by 0 to many characters(ie u>rag</u ) till last >

You should replace it with this regex

<.*?>

.* is greedy ie it would eat as many characters as it matches

.*? is lazy ie it would eat as less characters as possible

Answer 3

Sure you can:

   string input = "<u>ragu</u>";
    string regex = "(\\<[/]?[a-z]\\>)";
    string output = Regex.Replace(input, regex, "");

Answer 4

You don't need to use regex for that.

string input = "<u>rag</u>".Replace("<u>", "").Replace("</u>", "");
Console.WriteLine(input);

Answer 5

Your code was almost correct, a small modification makes it work:

 string input = "<u>ragu</u>";
 string regex = @"<.*?\>";
 string output = Regex.Replace(input, regex, string.empty);

Output is 'ragu'.

EDIT : this solution may not be the best. Interesting remark from user the-land-of-devils-srilanka: do not use regex to parse HTML. Indeed, see also RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags .