Silverlight Tip - Managing HTML

Problem: Silverlight 2 & Silverlight 3 do not support HTML, how can I remove the tags?

Solution: Although there are many solutions to this problem, the quickest and most frequently solution I use is a regular expression to remove HTML tags.  The most straightforward example I’ve found is from John Papa’s book Data Driven Services with Silverlight 2

// Remove HTML tags and empty newlines and spaces and leading spaces
string formattedValue = REgex.Replace(value as string, "<.*?>", "");
formattedValue = Regex.Replace(formattedValue, @"\n+\s+", "\n\n");
formattedValue = formattedValue.TrimStart(’ ‘);
fromattedValue = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(formattedValue);
if(length > 0 && formattedValue.Length >= length)
  formattedvalue = formattedValue.Substring(0, length - 1);
return formattedValue;

Over the past year Corey was a lead developer on the NBCOlympics.com Silverlight 2 video player, he is currently finishing up a book with PeachPit Press - Microsoft Expression Blend a Visual Quickstart Guide (ISBN 0-321-41223-0), and he maintains a Silverlight blog “Silverlight made Simple”. Other Silverilght project he has worked on are HSN.tv with Silverlight 1.0 and the Blockbuster Stream application using Silverlight 2. Corey is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 9 posts at DZone.