Say you have an HTML snippet and you would like to extract the plain text from the snippet without any of the HTML tags. This may come handy when you are sending mail through a program that doesn’t support HTML Mail.

The easiest way would be to strip all the HTML tags using the replace() method of JavaScript. It finds all tags enclosed in angle brackets and replaces them with a space.

var text = html.replace(/<\/?[^>]+>/gi, ' ');

The problem with the above approach is that it may fail for malformed HTML or when the HTML content contains entities like dashes, ampersands and other punctuation codes. The workaround is simple though.

var temp = document.createElement('div');
temp.innerHTML = html;
return temp.textContent || temp.innerText || '';