How to remove BB codes from a string?

Question

How to get ride of all BBcodes in a string but keep the content?

Example:

[B]This is bold[/B] and This is [color=#FFCCCC]colored[/color]

Will be :

This is bold and This is colored

Answer 1

I suppose you could just use a regular expression and the preg_replace function, to replace everything that's between [ and ] by an empty string :

$str = '[B]This is bold[/B] and This is [color=#FFCCCC]colored[/color]';
echo preg_replace('#\[[^\]]+\]#', '', $str);

Will display :

This is bold and This is colored

Here, the pattern I used is matching :

• a [ character : \[
• Anything that's not a ] character : [^\]]
  • One or more time : [^\]]+
• and a ] character : \]

Note that [ and ] have a special meaning -- which means you have to escape them when you want them to be interpreted literally.

Answer 2

I found this from this source. All credit goes to the author, ShEx.

function stripBBCode($text_to_search) {
    $pattern = '|[[\/\!]*?[^\[\]]*?]|si';
    $replace = '';
    return preg_replace($pattern, $replace, $text_to_search);
    }

echo stripBBCode($text_to_search);

I've tested it and it does work.