Android-RTEditor | Android RTEditor is a rich text editor component | Editor library

We allow the user to create some text that will get converted to HTML, using a rich-text editor library (called Android-RTEditor).

The output HTML text is saved as is on the server and the device.

Because on some end cases, there is a need to show a lot of this content (multiple instances), we wish to also save a "preview" version of this content, meaning it will be much shorter in length (say 120 of normal characters, excluding the extra characters for the HTML tags, which are not counted).

What we want is a minimized version of the HTML. Some tags might optionally be removed, but we still want to see lists (numbered/bullets), no matter what we choose to do, because lists do show like text to the user (the bullet is a character, and so do the numbers with the dot).

The tag of going to next line should also be handled , as it's important to go to the next line.

As opposed to a normal string, where I can just call substring with the required number of characters, on HTML it might ruin the tags.

I've thought of 2 possible solutions for this:

1. Convert to plain text (while having some tags handled), and then truncate : Parse the HTML, and replacing some tags with Unicode alternatives, while removing the others. For example, instead of a bullet-list, put the bullet character (maybe this), and same for numbered list (put numbers instead). All the other tags would be removed. Same goes for the tag of going to the next line ("
   "), which should be replaced with "\n". After that, I could safely truncate the normal text, because there are no more tags that could be ruined.

2. Truncate nicely inside the HTML : Parse the HTML, while identifying the text within it, and truncate it there and closing all tags when reaching the truncation position. This might even be harder.

I'm not sure which is easier, but I can think of possible disadvantages for each. It is just a preview though, so I don't think it matters much.

I've searched the Internet for such solutions, to see if others have made it. I've found some links that talk about "cleaning" or "optimizing" HTML, but I don't see they can handle replacing them or truncating them. Not only that, but since it's HTML, most are not related to Android, and use PHP, C#, Angular and others as their language.

Here are some links that I've found:

• Java Library to truncate html strings?

• how to truncate HTML string without leaving it malformated?

1. Are those solutions that I've written possible? If so, is there maybe a known way to implement them? Or even a Java/Kotlin/Android library? How hard would it be to make such a solution?

2. Maybe other solution I haven't thought about?

EDIT: I've also tried using an old code I've made in the past (here), which parses XML. Maybe it will work. I also try now to investigate some third party libraries for parsing HTML, such as Jsoup. I think it can help with the truncating, while supporting "faulty" HTML inputs.