Madhivanan

Removing tags from a string

In http://ask.sqlteam.com, a question was asked about removing the comments from the HTML template

The comments have the following pattern

{/*}comment{*/}

The comments can be nested too

The task is to remove all the comments

Here is my solution

declare @string varchar(8000) ,@data varchar(8000)

select @string = 'AaaA{/*}XxxX{/*}YyyyY{*/}ZzzzZ{*/}BbbB{/*}CCC{*/}DdD'

select @string=replace(replace(@string, '{/*}','~{/*}'),'{*/}','~{*/}')

insert into @t(data)
select 
        substring(@string, n, charindex('~', @string + '~', n ) - n)
from
( 
        select number as n from master..spt_values where type='p'
) numbers
where 
        substring( '~' + @string, n, 1 ) = '~'

--Method 1

select @string

--Method 2

select @string =''

select
        @string =@string +substring(t2.data,5,len(t2.data))
from 
        @t as t1 inner join @t as t2 on t1.id+1=t2.id
where 
        t2.data like '{*/}%' and t2.id%2=1 and t2.data<>'{*/}'

select @string