How to strip out everything in a web page but the content?

I think this is a regex question

[MrSpeed]

I have a large web site that I would like to convert to a database driven site. What I am trying to do is extract the content and stuff into a databse so the site can be presented with a single template.

The content of each page luckily has comment tags to mark the start of the content and pretty consistent markup to denote the end of the content.

<!--Start Content-->
blah blah blah
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table width="740">.....

I have tried to use the global find/replace tool and regular expressions in Homesite to strip everything in the file before the <!--Start Content--> but I get errors. I tried to use other text editors but the regular expressions only matches one line and not to the beginning of the file.

I have tried
.*<!--Start Content-->
^.*<!--Start Content-->
^^.*<!--Start Content-->

The site is on IIS without perl. So I am looking for a desktop type solution. I have homesite, dreamweaver, a few different text editors.

Any ideas please?

[RonPK]

HomeSite should do it. However, you need to escape the hyphens in your regexp pattern, like this:

^.*<!\-\-Start Content\-\->

[rayvd]

If you have access to a Linux/Un*x box...

% lynx -dump <url>

or

% links -dump <url>

links is a little nicer IMHO. This may or may not do what you wanted, but it does a nice job of stripping the tags, and would be worth trying before you go and wrote a Perl script to do it or something :)

[MrSpeed]

Well since I'm a little better at ASP than Unix languages I wrote a script to complete the task. It used a little regexp and some brute force replace functions. Got close to 600 pages in an access database now which will be great going forward.

[grahamstewart]

If you can use PHP then the

strip_tags()

function does this for you.

[Chuma]

Notetab allows you to strip HTML from a file (you can preserve URLs if you wish.)

I use it quite regulary when I want to read information from a website but don't want to download all the other elements of the page as well.

Thanks.