Strip out HTML Tags to Display Plain Text in XSLT

kaushalparik — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 05:33:00 GMT

I was having a requirement with my on-going project, in which I need to display the Blog RSS on Home Page. I used BlogEngine.NET with some visual modification.
Now, on home page I need to display latest 4 entries of entered Blogs which I easily get thru RSS link from BlogEngine.NET.

But, the issue comes when I need to render the contents; that is latest 4 Blog entrties. They are entered using FCKEditor tool, So, I was getting text with HTML tags.
Because of BlogEngine.NET uses FCKEditor while posting a new Blog Entry, there are useless <p>, <div>, <Span>, <font> and   tags and values and fonts with different size and colors comes with the Blog Post entry. Specially, when people directly copy and paste some contents from another web source.

I need to Strip out these HTML tags and display Plain Text for a consistant look out on my home page, so these additional <p>, <div>, <Span>, <font> and   tags would not blot on my home page. To display RSS entries, means simply create a RSS Feed Reader (I think I will blog on that also), I used XSLT file to format the RSS content.

I found below function in XSLT which will remove HTML tags from my Description Field from DB (which is filled from FCKEditor):
Below is the function to remove HTML tags:

<xsl:template name="removeHtmlTags">
    <xsl:param name="html"/>
    <xsl:choose>
      <xsl:when test="contains($html, '<')">
        <xsl:value-of select="substring-before($html, '<')"/>
        
        <xsl:call-template name="removeHtmlTags">
          <xsl:with-param name="html" select="substring-after($html, '>')"/>
        </xsl:call-template>
      </xsl:when>
      <xsl:otherwise>
        <xsl:value-of select="$html"/>
      </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

You can see that the function name is removeHtmlTags which accepts one argument / parameter named as html which is my Description field that contains HTML Tags.
Logic is simple, its a recursive function which finds for '<' that is '<' means starting of any HTML Tag and take out the substring after this '<' Tag using substring-before() function as substring-before($html, '<') and again call the function with the rest of the string left after '>' that is '>' Tag.

This is how this function will be called:

    <xsl:template name="RssCell">
        <xsl:variable name="pureText">
            <xsl:call-template name="removeHtmlTags">
                <xsl:with-param name="html" select="DescriptionField" />
            </xsl:call-template>
        </xsl:variable>

        <div height='40' class='blog_text'>
            <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="substring($pureText, 0, 175)"/>
        </div>
    </xsl:template>

One Variable is declared as pureText. removeHtmlTags() function will strip out the HTML Tags and return the Plain Text values in this pureText variable.
I am passsin DescriptionField that is my DB Field with HTML Tags.

Finally, I am displaying max 175 chars of Plain Text as substring($pureText, 0, 175) inside a DIV.

Thats It!

KaushaL.NET : Strip HTML Tags

Strip out HTML Tags to Display Plain Text in XSLT