"Flatten" HTML Content (i.e strip tags) in Cocoa/Objective-C

"Flatten" HTML Content (i.e strip tags) in Cocoa/Objective-C

I needed to strip the tags from some HTML that was embedded in an XML feed so I could display a short summary from the full content in a UITableView. Rather than go through the effort of parsing HTML on the iPhone (as I already parsed the XML file) I built this simple method from some half-finished snippets I found. It has worked in all of the cases I have needed, but your mileage may vary. It is at least a working method (which cannot be said about most of the other examples). It works on the iPhone and in standard OS X coding.


- (NSString *)flattenHTML:(NSString *)html {

    NSScanner *theScanner;
    NSString *text = nil;

    theScanner = [NSScanner scannerWithString:html];

    while ([theScanner isAtEnd] == NO) {

        // find start of tag
        [theScanner scanUpToString:@"<" intoString:NULL] ; 

        // find end of tag
        [theScanner scanUpToString:@">" intoString:&text] ;

        // replace the found tag with a space
        //(you can filter multi-spaces out later if you wish)
        html = [html stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:
                           [ NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@>", text]
                     withString:@" "];

    } // while //
    
    return html;

}

13198 reads |

Tags: 2009, cocoa, html, iphone, objective-c, sdk, xml

hi, thanks sir

Submitted by snehil (not verified) on Thu, 2010-08-19 04:11.

hi, thanks sir

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Thank you! Just what I

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 2010-08-13 05:32.

Thank you! Just what I searched for!

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Hi, I'm having trouble

Submitted by Jack (not verified) on Mon, 2010-07-26 04:36.

Hi, I'm having trouble reading your site in the Avant browser (the font size it way too small). I've tried raising the font size from my browser but that didn't do the trick. Do you have any tips on what I can do? (By the way, I'm using Windows Vista) - ways to lose weight after baby

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Hey man, thanks for the

Submitted by Drew Breunig (not verified) on Sat, 2010-07-03 17:11.

Hey man, thanks for the tip!

Some of my returned strings were starting off with spaces, so I tacked on a bit of code to the end:

// Trimmed return
return [html stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceCharacterSet]];

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THANK you very much!!! You

Submitted by Bill (not verified) on Mon, 2010-06-28 11:48.

THANK you very much!!! You save me a lot of time!!! you make my day!!!!!!!

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As others have wondered:

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 2010-05-23 22:41.

As others have wondered: where would this go? Would I put this in the parser?

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It just takes a string as

Submitted by bob on Mon, 2010-05-24 21:47.

It just takes a string as input, so it can go anywhere you want it. I'd grab the contents of a URL (slurp it into an NSString) and then pass it through here before doing anything else with it. Remember, it's for stripping tags from HTML pages, not sifting through an XML file.

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this snippet is pretty good:)

Submitted by Net Deveload (not verified) on Wed, 2010-03-31 05:31.

this snippet is pretty good:) thanx for this

http://netdeveload.wordpress.com for .net development

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Thank you very much, I have

Submitted by DFG (not verified) on Sun, 2010-03-28 16:58.

Thank you very much,

I have used a code almost equal as this one for my projects, and it worked perfectly, but very slow. I need a more optimized solution.. I think I'll will try to convert to a C string, and do the parsing in plain C..

cheers

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Wow, like everyone else has

Submitted by Jen D (not verified) on Thu, 2010-03-25 14:59.

Wow, like everyone else has said, Thank you! I've been looking for something like this and nothing ever seemed to really work right but this is great. Again, much appreciated!

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Where did you put this

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 2010-03-25 12:51.

Where did you put this snippet? Any help would be appreciated.

*from a frustrated would-be app coder*

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works perfect for me! Great

Submitted by springrider (not verified) on Sun, 2010-01-17 11:31.

works perfect for me! Great thanks!

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Where do you place this code?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 2010-04-09 13:48.

Where do you place this code? In the view controller or rss parser? I would like to use this in my rss reader app and cannot get the html tags out of the blog detail view.

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Thanks, that worked well for

Submitted by mario (not verified) on Sun, 2009-12-20 20:31.

Thanks, that worked well for flattening rss feeds.

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Thank you so much!! THat has

Submitted by Damian OSuilleabhain (not verified) on Wed, 2009-12-09 18:20.

Thank you so much!! THat has really solved a big problem for me.

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Thanks a lot for this

Submitted by Dev (not verified) on Fri, 2009-12-04 10:19.

Thanks a lot for this snippet! Had the same issue of already parsing an XML and not wanting to do it again :)

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After used this code, i'm

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 2009-09-15 05:06.

After used this code, i'm getting my contents. But it is completely messed up with white spaces as it is big 4 paragraph srtring. I don't how to remove only the uneccessary white spaces. Author should have written that code sample too..waiting ..

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Change: withString:@"

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 2009-10-04 10:21.

Change:
withString:@" "
to
withString:@"".
Should work fine.

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Awesome, thanks a

Submitted by Mann (not verified) on Fri, 2009-07-31 19:32.

Awesome, thanks a million!!!!! I tried a number of things... adapting to Objective C is great with a community that helps push adoption of techniques. Thanks again.

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thanks. worked well for

Submitted by Alvaro (not verified) on Sat, 2009-07-18 04:34.

thanks. worked well for flattening rss feeds.

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Much thanks for this code

Submitted by John Bellone (not verified) on Wed, 2009-05-06 23:28.

Much thanks for this code snippet. I have been messing around with the TouchXML libraries only to realize that they did not output XML (only read it) and was beginning to get frustrated. Its very bad when you know *how* to do something but you don't know the underlying libraries to accomplish it.

Great little snippet. Thanks again,
jb

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