removeTagsExceptSpan()

Remove HTML tags while preserving span elements

Overview

Removes anchor and hadeeth tags from the content while preserving <span> elements. This is useful for cleaning Shamela HTML while maintaining the title hierarchy information stored in span tags.

Signature

removeTagsExceptSpan(content: string): string

Parameters

content · string · required

HTML string containing various tags

Returns

string · string

The content with only span tags retained

Tags Removed

Anchor Tags (<a>)

• Removes <a> tags but preserves the text content inside
• Pattern: /<a[^>]*>(.*?)<\/a>/gs
• Example: <a href="inr://123">text</a> → text

Hadeeth Tags

• Removes all hadeeth-related tags:
  • Self-closing: <hadeeth />
  • With content: <hadeeth>...</hadeeth>
  • Numbered: <hadeeth-1>, <hadeeth-2>, etc.
• Pattern: /<hadeeth[^>]*>|<\/hadeeth>|<hadeeth-\d+>/gs

Example

import { removeTagsExceptSpan } from 'shamela';

const html = `
<span data-type="title" id="toc-1">الباب الأول</span>
<a href="inr://123">رابط الراوي</a>
<hadeeth-1>متن الحديث</hadeeth-1>
<span data-type="title" id="toc-2">الباب الثاني</span>
`;

const cleaned = removeTagsExceptSpan(html);

console.log(cleaned);
// Output:
// <span data-type="title" id="toc-1">الباب الأول</span>
// رابط الراوي
// متن الحديث
// <span data-type="title" id="toc-2">الباب الثاني</span>

Use Cases

Preserve Title Hierarchy

import { removeTagsExceptSpan, parseContentRobust } from 'shamela';

// Clean HTML but keep title spans
const cleaned = removeTagsExceptSpan(rawHtml);

// Parse to extract title hierarchy
const lines = parseContentRobust(cleaned);

Prepare for Display

import { removeTagsExceptSpan, normalizeHtml } from 'shamela';

// Remove unwanted tags
let content = removeTagsExceptSpan(rawHtml);

// Normalize remaining HTML for CSS styling
content = normalizeHtml(content);

Processing Pipeline

Recommended order when processing Shamela content:

import {
  mapPageCharacterContent,
  removeTagsExceptSpan,
  removeArabicNumericPageMarkers,
  parseContentRobust,
} from 'shamela';

// 1. Normalize characters first
let content = mapPageCharacterContent(rawContent);

// 2. Remove unwanted tags (keeps spans)
content = removeTagsExceptSpan(content);

// 3. Remove page markers
content = removeArabicNumericPageMarkers(content);

// 4. Parse into structured lines
const lines = parseContentRobust(content);

Complete Tag Removal

If you need to remove ALL tags including spans, use stripHtmlTags() instead:

import { stripHtmlTags } from 'shamela';

const plainText = stripHtmlTags(html);
// All tags removed, only text remains

Related Functions

• stripHtmlTags() - Remove ALL HTML tags
• normalizeHtml() - Normalize hadeeth tags to spans
• parseContentRobust() - Parse HTML preserving title hierarchy