Detect HTML tags in a string

Question

I need to detect whether a string contains HTML tags.

if(!preg_match(\'(?<=<)\\w+(?=[^<]*?>)\', $string)){ 
    return $string;
}

Answer 1

A simple solution is:

if($string != strip_tags($string)) {
    // contains HTML
}

The benefit of this over a regex is it's easier to understand, however I could not comment on the speed of execution of either solution.