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phpdomhtml-parsingstrip-tags

How to strip tags in a safer way than using strip_tags function?

I'm having some problems using strip_tags PHP function when the string contains 'less than' and 'greater than' signs. For example:

If I do:

strip_tags("<span>some text <5ml and then >10ml some text </span>");

I'll get:

some text 10ml some text

But, obviously I want to get:

some text <5ml and then >10ml some text

Yes I know that I could use &lt; and &gt;, but I don't have chance to convert those characters into HTML entities since data is already stored as you can see in my example.

What I'm looking for is a clever way to parse HTML in order to get rid only actual HTML tags.

Since TinyMCE was used for generate that data, I know which actual html tags could be used in any case, so a strip_tags($string, $black_list) implementation would be more usefull than strip_tags($string, $allowable_tags).

Any thoughs?

Solution

  • As a wacky workaround you could filter non-html brackets with:

    $html = preg_replace("# <(?![/a-z]) | (?<=\s)>(?![a-z]) #exi", "htmlentities('$0')", $html);

    Apply strip_tags() afterwards. Note how this only works for your specific example and similar cases. It's a regular expression with some heuristics, not artificial intellegince to discern html tags from unescaped angle brackets with other meaning.