How to wipe html special chars like   and others from text with the help of PHP?

Question

How to wipe html special chars like   and others from text with the help of PHP?

Answer 1

.....

$newtext = html_entitiy_decode($your_text);

You got to remove   separately:

$newtext = str_replace(' ', '', $newtext);

If you want to remove html tags too, you can use:

$newtext = strip_tags($newtext);

.

Relevant Functions Reference:

html_entity_decode

strip_tags

str_replace

Answer 2

You might want to try with html_entity_decode ;-)

For example :

$html = "this is a text";
var_dump($html);
var_dump(html_entity_decode($html, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8'));

Will give you :

string 'this is a text' (length=19)
string 'this is a text' (length=15)

Note that you might need to specify the third parameter -- the charset -- if you are not working with ISO-8859-1.

Answer 3

Look at html_entity_decode to convert the characters to something more human-readable.

Answer 4

If he meant removing, here's how to do it:

preg_replace("/&#?[a-z0-9]{2,8};/i", "", $text_with_special_chars); 

(Found at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/657643/how-to-remove-html-special-chars-in-php)