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unicorn's avatar
unicorn
Regular Visitor
9 years ago
Solved

Robust function to remove HTML tags

Hi, I have a column of HTML data that I need to display as text. I need to get rid of all HTML tags and substitute reserved HTML characters. I was trying to recursively remove all HTML tags first. Th...
  • MarcelBeug's avatar
    MarcelBeug
    9 years ago

    Just change the "|" into "<"

     

    rmvAll = if Text.PositionOf(rmvOne, "<") >= 0 then @removeAll(rmvOne) else rmvOne

     

    Otherwise you may get unexpected results if the string contains < or > that are not part of a HTML tag.

     

    If you are interested, I can share my code that only removes tag pairs, i.e. </...> strings preceded by the same without /: <...>

stejin's avatar
stejin
New Member
6 years ago

Here is a different approach that uses the built-in Web.Page function.

 

Below custom function replace special characters such as &nbsp; or $amp; and additionally parses and combines text in HTML tags.

 

(Text as any) => let
        Source = Text,
        Html = Web.Page(Source),
        resolve = (t as table) =>
            let
                Result = List.Accumulate(Table.ToRecords(t), {}, (state, current) => List.Combine({state, if current[Text] <> null then {current[Text]} else if current[Children] <> null then @resolve(current[Children]) else {null} }))
            in
                Result,
        Tables = Html[Data]{0},
        Text1 = resolve(Tables),
        Text2 = List.Select(Text1, each Text.Length(Text.Trim(_)) > 0),
        Text3 = Text.Combine(Text2, Character.FromNumber(10))
    in
        Text3