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I'm working on a program to remove tags from a HTML document, leaving
just the content, but I want to do it simply. I've finished a system
to remove simple tags, but I want all CSS and JS to be removed. What
re pattern could I use to do that?

I've tried
'<script[\S\s]*/script>'
but that didn't work properly. I'm fairly basic in my knowledge of
Python, so I'm still trying to learn re.
What pattern would work?

i80and wrote:
> I'm working on a program to remove tags from a HTML document, leaving
> just the content, but I want to do it simply. I've finished a system
> to remove simple tags, but I want all CSS and JS to be removed. What
> re pattern could I use to do that?
>
> I've tried
> '<script[\S\s]*/script>'
> but that didn't work properly. I'm fairly basic in my knowledge of
> Python, so I'm still trying to learn re.
> What pattern would work?

I use re.compile("<script.*?</script>",re.DOTALL)
for scripts. I strip this out first since my tag stripping re will
strip out script tags as well hope this was of help.

>> I've tried
>> '<script[\S\s]*/script>'
>> but that didn't work properly. I'm fairly basic in my knowledge of
>> Python, so I'm still trying to learn re.
>> What pattern would work?
>
> I use re.compile("<script.*?</script>",re.DOTALL)
> for scripts. I strip this out first since my tag stripping re will
> strip out script tags as well hope this was of help.

This won't catch various alterations of

<
script
>
doEvil()
<
/
script
>

which is valid html/xhtml.

For less valid html, but still attemptable, one might find
something like

<scrip<script>hah</script>t>doEvil()</script>

which, if you nuke your pattern, leaves the valid but unwanted

<script>doEvil()</script>

I'd propose that it's better to use something such as
BeautifulSoup that actually parses the HTML, and then skim
through it whitelisting the tags you plan to allow, and skipping
the emission of any tags that don't make the whitelist.

-tkc