Extract text between HTML tags

Question 1

Normally you'd use the Internet Explorer COM object for this:

root = "C:\base\dir"

Set ie = CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application")

For Each f In fso.GetFolder(root).Files
  ie.Navigate "file:///" & f.Path
  While ie.Busy : WScript.Sleep 100 : Wend

  text = ie.document.getElementById("MySection").innerText

  WScript.Echo Replace(text, vbNewLine, "")
Next

However, the <section> tag is not supported prior to IE 9, and even in IE 9 the COM object doesn't seem to handle it correctly, as getElementById("MySection") only returns the opening tag:

>>> wsh.echo ie.document.getelementbyid("MySection").outerhtml
<SECTION id=MySection>

You could use a regular expression instead, though:

root = "C:\base\dir"

Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

Set re1 = New RegExp
re1.Pattern = "<section id=""MySection"">([\s\S]*?)</section>"
re1.Global  = False
re2.IgnoreCase = True

Set re2 = New RegExp
re2.Pattern = "(<br>|\s)+"
re2.Global  = True
re2.IgnoreCase = True

For Each f In fso.GetFolder(root).Files
  html = fso.OpenTextFile(filename).ReadAll

  Set m = re1.Execute(html)
  If m.Count > 0 Then
    text = Trim(re2.Replace(m.SubMatches(0).Value, " "))
  End If

  WScript.Echo text
Next

Question 2

Here a one-liner solution using perl and a HTML parser from Mojolicious framework:

perl -MMojo::DOM -E '
    say Mojo::DOM->new( do { undef $/; <> } )->at( q|#MySection| )->text
' index.html

Assuming index.html with following content:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
</head>
<body id="portada">
<section id="MySection">
Some text here
another line here <br>
last line of text.
</section>
</body>
</html>

It yields:

Some text here another line here last line of text.