SQL Server - How to remove HTML tags from data

1.     Background

The purpose of this article is to provide a way of cleaning up of HTML tags within the data. When we use various styles or tabular format data in UI using Rich Text Editor/ Rad Grid etc, it will save data in database with HTML tags.

·         Fig. 1 showing data with style using Rich text editor in UI

 

·         Fig 2 showing data saved in table corresponding to fig 1 with HTML tags

           
            

·         If we simply pull the data from the table for SSRS or excel then data will come with HTML tags unless we explicitly remove the HTML tags from the data.

2.     What is HTML Tags?

An HTML element starts with a start tag (<p>) and ends with end tag (<p/>) and everything between

Start tag and End tag is HTML element. e.g.

       <b>Following are the popular databases: <br />  </b>1. SQL Server <br />  2. Oracle <br />  3.    
      Teradata <br />  4. Sybase

3.     Script to remove HTML tags from the data?   

We are using SQL Server CHARINDEX function to get the positions of ‘<’ and ‘>’ and once found replacing the string between <….> with blank using STUFF function. We are using WHILE Loop that will run till presence of ‘<’ & ‘>’ in the string. Below is the UDF script that performs HTML Tags clean up from data.

/****** Object:  UserDefinedFunction [dbo].[usp_ClearHTMLTags]   ******/ 

    SET ANSI_NULLS ON 

    GO 

    SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON 

    GO 

    /**************************************************************************** 

    Name of Author  :   Vishal Jharwade 

    Purpose         :   The Purpose of this function is to clean the html tags from the data. 

    ***************************************************************************************/ 

    CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[usp_ClearHTMLTags] 

    (@String NVARCHAR(MAX)) 

     

    RETURNS NVARCHAR(MAX) 

    AS 

    BEGIN 

        DECLARE @Start INT, 

                @End INT, 

                @Length INT 

         

        WHILE CHARINDEX('<', @String) > 0 AND CHARINDEX('>', @String, CHARINDEX('<', @String)) > 0 

        BEGIN 

            SELECT  @Start  = CHARINDEX('<', @String),  

                    @End    = CHARINDEX('>', @String, CHARINDEX('<', @String)) 

            SELECT @Length = (@End - @Start) + 1 

             

            IF @Length > 0 

            BEGIN 

                SELECT @String = STUFF(@String, @Start, @Length, '') 

             END 

         END 

         

        RETURN @String 

    END 

4.     Conclusion

By using above UDF, We can clean the HTML tags from the data.

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