Remove or strip Rich Text Formatting (RTF) in PostgreSQL. This code is a port of the python project striprtf project by joshy to PostgreSQL. Many thanks for this code.

Once your text has been run thourgh the strip function, no formatting text will be left over, only the visible text will stay.

This project is implemented in pl/pgsql, the postgres native imperative programming language. The function uses regexp and iterates over single characters with many conditionals and might therefore not be the fastest. Processing 75.000 short (144 char average) texts takes around 70s on a decent machine, amounting to roughly 1ms per text.

Beware: This code only implements the features of RTF that are necessary for our application. The implementation is incomplete and broken to some extent.

Run the content of pg_striprtf.sql in the schema of your choice to install the striprtf function.

Pass the rtf formatted text to the function striprtf and receive text with RTF formatting removed.

There is a short test suite available in the test.sql file. It uses the pg_tap test framework. Use pg_prove to run the tests after having installed the pgtap extension using your package manager and having created the extension in the schema of choice.

Contributions are always welcome. Please submit a pull request if you have changes that improve on the current version.