How to remove html special chars in PHP?

Question

I am creating a rss feed file for my application in which I want to remove HTML tags, which is done by strip_tags But strip_tags is not removing html special code chars

  & © etc

Please tell me any function using which I can remove these special code chars from my string,

Thanks

Answer 1

Use html_entity_decode to convert HTML entities.

You'll need to set charset to make it work correctly.

Answer 2

You may want take a look at htmlentities() and html_entity_decode() here

$orig = "I'll \"walk\" the <b>dog</b> now";

$a = htmlentities($orig);

$b = html_entity_decode($a);

echo $a; // I'll &quot;walk&quot; the &lt;b&gt;dog&lt;/b&gt; now

echo $b; // I'll "walk" the <b>dog</b> now

Answer 3

Either decode them using html_entity_decode or remove them using preg_replace:

$Content = preg_replace("/&#?[a-z0-9]+;/i","",$Content);

(From here)

EDIT: Alternative according to Jacco's comment

might be nice to replace the '+' with {2,8} or something. This will limit the chance of replacing entire sentences when an unencoded '&' is present.

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

Answer 4

A plain vanilla strings way to do it without engaging the preg regex engine:

function remEntities($str) {
  if(substr_count($str, '&') && substr_count($str, ';')) {
    // Find amper
    $amp_pos = strpos($str, '&');
    //Find the ;
    $semi_pos = strpos($str, ';');
    // Only if the ; is after the &
    if($semi_pos > $amp_pos) {
      //is a HTML entity, try to remove
      $tmp = substr($str, 0, $amp_pos);
      $tmp = $tmp. substr($str, $semi_pos + 1, strlen($str));
      $str = $tmp;
      //Has another entity in it?
      if(substr_count($str, '&') && substr_count($str, ';'))
        $str = remEntities($tmp);
    }
  }
  return $str;
}

Answer 5

It looks like what you really want is:

function xmlEntities($string) {
    $translationTable = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES, ENT_QUOTES);

    foreach ($translationTable as $char => $entity) {
        $from[] = $entity;
        $to[] = '&#'.ord($char).';';
    }
    return str_replace($from, $to, $string);
}

It replaces the named-entities with their number-equivalent.

Answer 6

<?php
function strip_only($str, $tags, $stripContent = false) {
    $content = '';
    if(!is_array($tags)) {
        $tags = (strpos($str, '>') !== false
                 ? explode('>', str_replace('<', '', $tags))
                 : array($tags));
        if(end($tags) == '') array_pop($tags);
    }
    foreach($tags as $tag) {
        if ($stripContent)
             $content = '(.+</'.$tag.'[^>]*>|)';
         $str = preg_replace('#</?'.$tag.'[^>]*>'.$content.'#is', '', $str);
    }
    return $str;
}

$str = '<font color="red">red</font> text';
$tags = 'font';
$a = strip_only($str, $tags); // red text
$b = strip_only($str, $tags, true); // text
?>