Strip HTML of Tags

A common practice of analyzing web data sources when they do not provide an API for structured access is to scrape the web pages themselves. This is an imprecise process and prone to easy breakage, but sometimes still useful. One part of this process that could be useful is to remove the HTML content, leaving just the text on the page. This could also be useful in a simple web-indexing application. You can use regular expressions to accomplish this :

private string StripHtml(string source)
{
    string[] patterns = {
        @"<(.|\n)*?>",          //general HTML tags
        @"<script.*?</script>"  //script tags
                        };
    string stripped = source;
    foreach (string pattern in patterns)
    {
        stripped = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(
                     stripped, pattern, string.Empty);
    }

    return stripped;
}