This is an important tutorial about stripping HTML tags in PHP with sample code. Sometimes you encountered a situation when you are outputting a text into a document say RSS feeds or PDF. And the content (text) that is being outputted contains html entities for example: & nbsp ;
Common practice of removing html tags in PHP is using the function: strip_tags, however this function will not remove html entities; as a result html entities in being outputted to html resulting in gibberish text.
PHP function to handle the removal of html tags will usually be in the form:
$htmlfreecontent = strip_tags($content);
To remove html entities in PHP is to use the function: html_entity_decode
So this function can be integrate to the above resulting to:
$htmlfreecontent = strip_tags(html_entity_decode($content));
As a result, any html entities will be converted to their applicable characters.
Nice, sweet and well-pointed article.
Addition: You can allow some of the tags if you want.
$htmlfreecontent = strip_tags($content,',');will strip all tags except p and strong.