Strip HTML tags using JavaScript

I've often found myself in need of stripping HTML tags from a string. This is a common task when working with web content, and it's often necessary to remove tags to get the raw text.

All you really need is a carefully crafted regular expression, such as /\<[^>]*\>/g, to match and remove all HTML tags from a string. This expression matches the opening bracket of a tag, followed by any number of characters that are not the closing bracket, and finally the closing bracket. The g flag makes sure that all matches are removed, not just the first one.

You can then easily combine this regular expression with String.prototype.replace() to remove all HTML tags from a string. As a bonus, this also works for XML tags, which might also come in handy from time to time.

const stripHTMLTags = str => str.replace(/<[^>]*>/g, '');

stripHTMLTags('<p><em>lorem</em> <strong>ipsum</strong></p>'); // 'lorem ipsum'