How to Match HTML Tags (Safely)
The golden rule of the internet: Do not use regex to parse HTML. Use a proper DOM parser like Cheerio or BeautifulSoup.
The Exception to the Rule
Sometimes you just need to strip tags from a string to count words or generate a snippet.
<[^>]+>This matches an opening bracket, anything that isn't a closing bracket, and then a closing bracket. It's fast and "good enough" for non-security contexts.
Security Warning
Never use regex to sanitize input against XSS. It is trivial to bypass regex filters with malformed HTML that browsers still execute.