Strip tags from a string

David Carr

PHP & MySQL Tutorials

From time to time you may need to remove certain tags from a string but leave other tags in tact, This tutorial will show you how to accomplish this.

You can use strip_tags() to remove all tags or specify which tags are allowed generally this is fine but what if you have a lot of different tags that you want to leave alone and only remove a one or more tags using strip_tags() you would need to specify every single tag you want to allow which can get very tiresome, a much better approach would be if you could simple say remove only the tags you specify.

There is no such function built into PHP to do that but making your own function to do this is thankfully very simple. All that needs to be passed to the function is the string and the tags you want to remove:

strip_only($str, '<br /><hr />');

The function scans all the tags in the string and if found removes them this is all done is a loop then once finished returns the string. 

function strip_only($str, $tags) {

if(!is_array($tags)) {

$tags = (strpos($str, '>') !== false ? explode('>', str_replace('<', '', $tags)) : array($tags));

if(end($tags) == '') array_pop($tags);

}

foreach($tags as $tag) $str = preg_replace('#</?'.$tag.'[^>]*>#is', '', $str);

return $str;

}

 

Fathom Analytics $10 discount on your first invoice using this link

David Carr - Laravel Developer

Hi, I’m David Carr

A Senior Developer at Vivedia
I love to use the TALL stack (Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, Laravel, and Laravel Livewire)

I enjoy writing tutorials and working on Open Source packages.

I also write books. I'm writing a new book Laravel Testing Cookbook, This book focuses on testing coving both PestPHP and PHPUnit.

Sponsor me on GitHub

Subscribe to my newsletter

Subscribe and get my books and product announcements.

Laravel Testing Cookbook

Help support the blog so that I can continue creating new content!

Fathom Analytics $10 discount on your first invoice using this link

Subscribe to my newsletter

Subscribe and get my books and product announcements.

© 2006 - 2023 DC Blog. All code MIT license. All rights reserved.