I have text in my DB that I want to display on the page. My DB content contains different tags eg. <html><b></b><help> (because users are allowed to use any type of tags) etc.
When I display the content of the page, I want the <br> tags decoded into spaces whereas other tags should remain like ordinary text.
Please, how do I go about it?
$content = preg_replace('/<br\s?\/?>/', ' ', $content);
echo html_entity_decode($content);
If you want <br> converted to a space, and then all HTML displayed with their entities.
If I misinterpreted your question, and you don't want the HTML displayed with their equivalent entities, just skip the html_entity_decode() function.
Your comment to your OP now says you want the <br> to be a line break, so simply switch that second argument of preg_replace() from ' ' to "\n".
Oh wait, I think I know what you want now. You want all tags to appear encoded, but the <br> to actually be a line break (i.e. not encoded)? Well if you do switch your <br> for \n, and you have no other line breaks, you could throw a quick and dirty nl2br() on the final markup.
Okay, just do this to get your encoded <br> back to a literal <br>.
echo str_replace('<br>', '<br>', $content);