How do I strip out all HTML tags except for safe ones I designate?

Question

  // FLAG ALL INCIDENTS OF LEGITIMATE TAGS BY CONVERTING <..> TO <!..!>
  for (int i = 0; i < parseVector.size(); i++) {
   this.content =
    this.content.replaceAll("<(/?)(" + (String)parseVector.elementAt(i) + "[\\s\\t=]+[^>]*)>",
                   "\\<!$1$2!\\>");
  }I have a Vector of HTML string text consisting of things like:
{"i", "b", "u", "blockquote", "font"}
And within this.content, which contains HTML, I want to strip out all HTML except for certain "safe" tags.
Problem is, my code fails to do just that.. while <img..> is gone, so is <i> and I want to keep the latter.
I feel the problem is in my regular expression pattern within this.content.replaceAll() method, but maybe I'm wrong. What do you say?
Entire code can be found in http://www.myjavaserver.com/~ppowell/HTMLParser.java
Thanx
Phil

Answer 1

Let me give you an example of what I want:
I understand what you want... I don't see how the code that you posted is supposed to that.
The best advice I can give is that a for loop is not part of the equation here. You will need to do it in one regex I think. Because if what you are doing there is saying replace all the tags that aren't <i> on one loop and replace all the tags that are not <b> in another loop guess what is happening?
On the first pass you don't replace the <i> tags but you do replace the <b> tags. On the next pass you replace <i> tags because they don't match the <b> etc.
You see?
So I think you need to do this all in one regex where the starting portion of the tag is NOT one of the set that you want to keep.