Remove HTML Tags in Javascript with Regex

I am trying to remove all the html tags out of a string in Javascript. Heres what I have... I can't figure out why its not working....any know what I am doing wrong?

<script type="text/javascript">

var regex = "/<(.|\n)*?>/";
var body = "<p>test</p>";
var result = body.replace(regex, "");
alert(result);

</script>

Thanks a lot!

From stackoverflow

• Try this, noting that the grammar of HTML is too complex for regular expressions to be correct 100% of the time:

  var regex = /(<([^>]+)>)/ig;
  var body = "<p>test</p>";
  var result = body.replace(regex, "");
  alert(result);
  

  If you're willing to use a library such as jQuery, you could simply do this:

  alert($('<p>test</p>').text());
  

  gmcalab : AWESOME, I didnt think about the jQuery option. That is way preferred! Thanks so much!

  brianary : Why are you wrapping the regex in a string? var regex = /(<([^>]+)>)/ig;

  karim79 : @brianary - because I'm an idiot. Corrected.

  Mike Samuel : This won't work. Specifically, it will fail on short tags: http://www.is-thought.co.uk/book/sgml-9.htm#SHORTTAG

• For a proper HTML sanitizer in JS, see http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/wiki/JsHtmlSanitizer