NAME

       HTML::Strip - Perl extension for stripping HTML markup from text.

SYNOPSIS

         use HTML::Strip;

         my $hs = HTML::Strip->new();

         my $clean_text = $hs->parse( $raw_html );
         $hs->eof;

DESCRIPTION

       This module simply strips HTML-like markup from text in a very quick and brutal manner. It
       could quite easily be used to strip XML or SGML from text as well; but removing HTML
       markup is a much more common problem, hence this module lives in the HTML:: namespace.

       It is written in XS, and thus about five times quicker than using regular expressions for
       the same task.

       It does not do any syntax checking (if you want that, use HTML::Parser), instead it merely
       applies the following rules:

       1.  Anything that looks like a tag, or group of tags will be replaced with a single space
           character. Tags are considered to be anything that starts with a "<" and ends with a
           ">"; with the caveat that a ">" character may appear in either of the following
           without ending the tag:

           Quote
               Quotes are considered to start with either a "'" or a """ character, and end with
               a matching character not preceded by an even number or escaping slashes (i.e. "\""
               does not end the quote but "\\\\"" does).

           Comment
               If the tag starts with an exclamation mark, it is assumed to be a declaration or a
               comment. Within such tags, ">" characters do not end the tag if they appear within
               pairs of double dashes (e.g. "<!-- <a href="old.htm">old page</a> -->" would be
               stripped completely).

       2.  Anything the appears within so-called strip tags is stripped as well. By default,
           these tags are "title", "script", "style" and "applet".

       HTML::Strip maintains state between calls, so you can parse a document in chunks should
       you wish. If one chunk ends half-way through a tag, quote, comment, or whatever; it will
       remember this, and expect the next call to parse to start with the remains of said tag.

       If this is not going to be the case, be sure to call $hs->eof() between calls to
       $hs->parse().

   METHODS
       new()
           Constructor. Can optionally take a hash of settings (with keys corresponsing to the
           "set_" methods below).

           For example, the following is a valid constructor:

            my $hs = HTML::Strip->new(
                                      striptags   => [ 'script', 'iframe' ],
                                      emit_spaces => 0
                                     );

       parse()
           Takes a string as an argument, returns it stripped of HTML.

       eof()
           Resets the current state information, ready to parse a new block of HTML.

       clear_striptags()
           Clears the current set of strip tags.

       add_striptag()
           Adds the string passed as an argument to the current set of strip tags.

       set_striptags()
           Takes a reference to an array of strings, which replace the current set of strip tags.

       set_emit_spaces()
           Takes a boolean value. If set to false, HTML::Strip will not attempt any conversion of
           tags into spaces. Set to true by default.

       set_decode_entities()
           Takes a boolean value. If set to false, HTML::Strip will decode HTML entities. Set to
           true by default.

   LIMITATIONS
       Whitespace
           Despite only outputting one space character per group of tags, and avoiding doing so
           when tags are bordered by spaces or the start or end of strings, HTML::Strip can often
           output more than desired; such as with the following HTML:

            <h1> HTML::Strip </h1> <p> <em> <strong> fast, and brutal </strong> </em> </p>

           Which gives the following output:

           " HTML::Strip    fast, and brutal   "

           Thus, you may want to post-filter the output of HTML::Strip to remove excess
           whitespace (for example, using "tr/ / /s;").  (This has been improved since previous
           releases, but is still an issue)

       HTML Entities
           HTML::Strip will only attempt decoding of HTML entities if HTML::Entities is
           installed.

   EXPORT
       None by default.

AUTHOR

       Alex Bowley <kilinrax@cpan.org>

SEE ALSO

       perl, HTML::Parser, HTML::Entities