SQL SERVER – 2005/2008 – User Defined Function to Strip HTML String Without Regular Expression

Suppose sometimes we are saving HTML string into the database(SQL Server).
Now when we want to display some limited characters on the web page like first 200 char,
return string will not be proper HTML as it will leave some open HTML tag into it and hense it will not render HTML properely on the web page and also disturb our page html.
So to avoide this problem we can strip html from the sql server. I have written an SQL UDF for that as below.

Following UDF takes input as HTML and returns TEXT only.
If there is any single quotes in HTML then it must be replaced with two single quotes while passing to the function as a input.

Create Function [dbo].[StripHTML]
(@HTMLString VarChar(Max))
Returns Varchar(Max)
As
Begin
    Declare @StartChar Int
    Declare @EndChar Int
    Declare @Length Int
    Set @StartChar = CharIndex('<',@HTMLString)
    Set @EndChar = CharIndex('>',@HTMLString,CharIndex('<',@HTMLString))
    Set @Length = (@EndChar - @StartChar) + 1
    While @StartChar > 0 AND @EndChar > 0 AND @Length > 0
    Begin
        Set @HTMLString = Stuff(@HTMLString,@StartChar,@Length,'')
        Set @StartChar = CharIndex('<',@HTMLString)
        Set @EndChar = CharIndex('>',v,CharIndex('<',@HTMLString))
        Set @Length = (@EndChar - @StartChar) + 1
    End
    Return LTrim(RTrim(@HTMLString))
End
Go

Example:
Declare @HTMLString As VarChar(Max) = '<table class="tempwrapper"> '+
 '<tr><td colspan="3">.NET that will convert a string so that it can be eg I would like to convert the string &quot;a &lt; b&quot; '+
 'to &quot;a &#3C; b&quot;.</td> </tr> </table>'
 Select SUBSTRING(@HTMLString,0,100)
 Select SUBSTRING([dbo].[StripHTML](@HTMLString),0,100)
-> <table class="tempwrapper"> <tr><td colspan="3">.NET that will convert a string so that it can be e
-> .NET that will convert a string so that it can be eg I would like to convert the string &quot;a &lt

Here I have attached a screen shot of the UDF at action.

Enjoy querying...