Wicked Cool PHP

#44: Stripping HTML Tags from Strings

Regular expressions are useful, but they're not the solution to every problem. Let's say that you plan to display possibly HTML-rich text inside another HTML page, and you need to strip out any possibly harmful HTML. Use the strip_tags() function:

<?php
print strip_tags($string);
?>

To add a few tags that you think users should be able to use, add an extra string parameter containing the open tags that you want to permit:

print strip_tags($string, "<i><b><p>");

This function is just one of many text-processing functions that PHP offers as an alternative to regular expressions or other do-it-yourself solutions. It's always worth a trip to the PHP manual to see if there's a built-in for your needs. But don't be ...