DevKits

Extraction

Match an HTML tag

Flags: g

Extract simple HTML tags for lightweight text processing.

Pattern

Regular expression

<\/?[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9]*\b[^>]*>

How it works

Matches opening or closing HTML tags of any name (`<a>`, `<div class="x">`, `</span>`, `<br/>`). Does not attempt to parse attributes or nested content.

Matches

  • ▸<div>
  • ▸<a href="/x" class="b">
  • ▸</span>
  • ▸<br/>

Non-matches

  • ▸< 1 (space after `<`)
  • ▸just text

Common gotchas

Do not use this to parse arbitrary HTML — the language is not regular. Use a DOM parser (`DOMParser` in browsers, BeautifulSoup in Python, Goquery in Go). This pattern is fine for quick text stripping and log processing.

Language snippets

JavaScript

const re = /<\/?[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9]*\b[^>]*>/g;
text.replace(re, ""); // strip tags

Python

re.sub(r"<\/?[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9]*\b[^>]*>", "", text)

Go

re := regexp.MustCompile(`<\/?[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9]*\b[^>]*>`)
re.ReplaceAllString(text, "")

Java

text.replaceAll("<\\/?[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9]*\\b[^>]*>", "")

Related patterns

Match a hashtag

#\w+

Match an @-mention

@[A-Za-z0-9_]{1,39}

Extract a URL query parameter

[?&]KEY=([^&#]*)

Match a quoted string

"(?:[^"\\]|\\.)*"

Try any pattern live in the Regex Tester →