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I have a file that is mixed with both normal text I need and html-tags. I know that with REGEX it is possible to recognize html tags and with sed one can swap those for an empty string, but I do not know how to apply it concretely.

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    sed is not good tool to remove html tags. Commented Feb 16, 2015 at 13:16
  • would it be possible to provide some samples? Are you looking to extract information from an XML file or cleanup some XML content within another file? Your choice of tool depends on what you are trying to achieve. Commented Feb 16, 2015 at 13:18
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    Obligatory: stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/… Commented Feb 16, 2015 at 13:45
  • Down that path lies madness. Commented Feb 16, 2015 at 16:33

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If you are not insisting on sed, the best thing to do this would be lynx.

lynx --dump <filename>.html

This will output the content of the html file in the format the html code was intending to display. The only condition is that the filename should have a .html or .htm extension.

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As long as your HTML tags are confined to a single line, the following will work:

sed 's/<[^>]*>//g'
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    What will happen with <tag attribute="legal use of >" foo=bar>? html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/… Commented Feb 16, 2015 at 13:31
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    This will not handle comments correctly. Example: <!-- > -->. Commented Feb 16, 2015 at 18:38
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I strongly recommend the use of either of the programs named html2text (1) (2) instead. Parsing HTML is much harder than it looks.

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