Substring without breaking html c#

Question

Hi guys I'm trying to take a description which has been entered in a wysiwyg editor and take a substring of it..

i.e

This is some <span style="font-weight:bold;">text</span>

I'd like to limit some descriptions without breaking the html if i just substring and add ...

it breaks the html tags..

I've tried:

string HtmlSubstring(string html, int maxlength)
    {
        string htmltag = "</?\\w+((\\s+\\w+(\\s*=\\s*(?:\".*?\"|'.*?'|[^'\">\\s]+))?)+\\s*|\\s*)/?>";
        string emptytags = "<(\\w+)((\\s+\\w+(\\s*=\\s*(?:\".*?\"|'.*?'|[^'\">\\s]+))?)+\\s*|\\s*)/?></\\1>";

        var expression = new Regex(string.Format("({0})|(.?)", htmltag));
        MatchCollection matches = expression.Matches(html);
        int i = 0;

        StringBuilder content = new StringBuilder();
        foreach (Match match in matches)
        {
            if (match.Value.Length == 1 && i < maxlength)
            {
                content.Append(match.Value);
                i++;
            }
            else if (match.Value.Length > 1)
            {
                content.Append(match.Value);
            }
        }
        return Regex.Replace(content.ToString(), emptytags, string.Empty);
    }

but it doesn't quite get me there!

Can you guarantee that the input is HTML encoded? Meaning, if a user types a > will it already be translated to >? — Yuck
– Yuck, Commented May 25, 2011 at 2:34
See this question for how to do html regex: stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/… — JK.
– JK., Commented May 25, 2011 at 2:43

wp78de · Accepted Answer · 2017-11-28 02:50:20Z

2

Use the HTML Agility Pack to load the HTML and then get InnerText.

var document = new HtmlDocument();
document.LoadHtml("...");
document.DocumentNode.InnerText;

Also see C#: HtmlAgilityPack extract inner text

edited Nov 28, 2017 at 2:50

wp78de

19.1k7 gold badges49 silver badges78 bronze badges

answered May 25, 2011 at 2:43

Richard Schneider

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