Sed remove tags from html file

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You can either use one of the many HTML to text converters, use Perl regex if possible <.+?> or if it must be sed use <[^>]*> 

sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g' file.html

If there’s no room for errors, use an HTML parser instead.
E.g. when an element is spread over two lines

<div
>Lorem ipsum</div>

this regular expression will not work.

This regular expression consists of three parts <, [^>]*, >

  • search for opening <
  • followed by zero or more characters *, which are not the closing >
    [...] is a character class, when it starts with ^ look for characters not in the class
  • and finally look for closing >

The simpler regular expression <.*> will not work, because it searches for the longest possible match, i.e. the last closing > in an input line. E.g., when you have more than one tag in an input line 

<name>Olaf</name> answers questions.

will result in

answers questions.

instead of

Olaf answers questions.

See also Repetition with Star and Plus, especially section Watch Out for The Greediness! and following, for a detailed explanation.

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