html/template: "stripTags" exportability in the html/template package

[gopherbot]

by uberjack:

The html/template package has a very handy "stripTags" function
(http://golang.org/src/pkg/html/template/html.go) that's currently unexported. This
function does state-based html stripping which would be very useful as a general-purpose
feature. It would be great to have this function be exported in future releases.

[adg]

Comment 1:

If we were to provide it, it should be part of package "html", not "html/template".
It's a pretty odd feature, though. And one you can write more easily using the
code.google.com/p/go.net/html package.
Feel free to copy and paste it where you need it, of course.

[gopherbot]

Comment 2 by uberjack:

I did (0xe1f/grr@6ddd85b69c59a47abc62cee3bcd662d681f1b4ba),
but sadly it requires a whole set of private classes and functions, and as a result I
ended up importing the entire template package - 11 files.

[gopherbot]

Comment 3 by lepidosteus:

> It's a pretty odd feature, though.
It's not that useful to display webpages / rendering templates, but it becomes really
handy whenever you need to display the text content of web resources in a non web
context - for example in a cli app - when said resources can have tags embedded in them.
Eg: displaying the content of a rss feed entries (many embed tags in there), listing the
text of all items in an <ul> list on a page (many have
<span>/<strong>/... embedded in the <li>), etc ...
While the function can be copied from "html/template", #2 shows just how much you need
to actually copy (pretty much the entire template package). Having it exported would
make more sense and would be really useful for all of us doing cli apps dealing with web
content

[rsc]

Comment 4:

Status changed to WorkingAsIntended.

[gopherbot]

Comment 5 by jake.austwick:

+1 for this to be considered. Having to import the entire template package for such a
simple useful function is unreasonable.

[gopherbot]

Comment 6 by me@rocketmails.net:

+1  Some very common use case is when sending emails as you need to send both text and
HTML versions.

[gopherbot]

Comment 7 by chris@pushbullet.com:

I've attached a file that does this.

Attachments:

1. strip.go (113963 bytes)

[earljwagner]

+1 for StripTags, either in html or html/template.