Stripping RTF from a text field

Question

Stripping RTF from a text field

meichmann

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Points: 1900
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June 30, 2017 at 11:10 am

#337910

Hello Everyone,
     I'm hoping to get a little help so here's my situation:
     I have a table that has a text field (varchar(MAX) to be exact). We will name this field "Text". The text in this field has RTF tags in it.
     Here are a few RTF tags that were listed:
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Arial;}
{\colortbl ;\red128\green128\blue0;\red0\green0\blue0;}
\viewkind4\uc1\pard{\pntext\f1\'B7\tab} - Yes there is no opening bracket for this, I double checked it
What I would like to do is run a procedure that would strip the RTF tags and just leave the plain text. Now I know this can't be an easy procedure so any and all help will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!

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Lowell SSC Guru Points: 323518 More actions · Answer 1

I've done this with a Common Language Runtime (CLR)that was unsafe(due to windows.forms) so i could create an RTF object and get the MyObject.Text from it.
if you google, you will see a lot of CLR examples.
there's a few old posts here on SSC that have examples of stripping RTF characters, but it's not perfect results, especially compared to the CLR results.

Lowell

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sgmunson SSC Guru Points: 110640 More actions · Answer 2

Stripping out tags of that nature is fraught with all kinds of potential "gotchas". Especially when at least one of them is in the category of "improperly formed". However, if you can identify all the tags, you can filter them all out, as long as there's a way to distinguish regular text from these tag values. And that's about as far as I can go with what you've provided so far. Much more detail needed to get any closer to a solution.

Steve (aka sgmunson) 🙂 🙂 🙂
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meichmann SSCommitted Points: 1900 More actions · Answer 3

I guess what I need to do is go through the text and and REPLACE clauses in my procedure to remove the tags and finish it off with trims. RIght now I'm creating a temp table and throwing the values there, so before inserting it into an actual table, I can process it there.

thanks for the help!!! 🙂