Objective C: Stripping HTML attributes from a string

Question

There are a lot of answers for stripping HTML tags from a string, but I'd like to strip only a specific attribute: style. The HTML that I'm dealing with has some seriously nasty inline styles, and often looks something like this:

<p class="someclass" style="margin-left:2cm;text-indent:-36.0pt">Blah.</p>

In order to adjust the display for my application, I need to strip that style attribute. Is there a fast way to process the document to do this? It needs to work in iOS.

Thanks!

The fastest solution is to do this in JavaScript in the web browser. — Michas
– Michas, Commented Jul 3, 2011 at 1:12

LaC · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-03 00:28:12Z

1

Use an XSLT transformation. See http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/cocoa/Conceptual/NSXML_Concepts/Articles/WritingXML.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001256-112639

answered Jul 3, 2011 at 0:28

LaC

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Tim Sullivan Over a year ago

Unfortunately, the XSLT stuff doesn't seem to be available to iOS. I should have mentioned that before, sorry!

Tim Sullivan · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-12 20:28:58Z

1

Ultimately, I went with a combination of ElementParser and regular expressions (using RegExKitLite), and stripping out the tags I didn't want and replacing them with ones I did, as required. Given that my HTML is coming from a trusted source, this should be fine.

It's far from ideal, but it's working. :-)

answered Jul 12, 2011 at 20:28

Tim Sullivan

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Comments

Kyle Howells · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-03 18:16:20Z

0

Well probably the simplest (but also quite expensive (CPU intensive)) is to use NSAttributedString+HMTL to turn it into an NSAttributedString. Then you can get the NSString from that.

Something like this.

  NSAttributedString *attrstring = [NSAttributedString attributedStringWithHTML:[htmlString dataUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding allowLossyConversion:YES] options:nil];

  //Access the string itself like this.
  [attrstring string];

[Warning: although this is the easiest way, (for you), it might not be the best way as it is quite expensive todo and will block your UI if done on the main thread (for obvious reasons)]

answered Jul 3, 2011 at 18:16

Kyle Howells

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