Strip out HTML and Special Characters

Question

I\'d like to use any php function or whatever so that i can remove any HTML code and special characters and gives me only alpha-numeric output

$des = "He         


        

Answer 1

Here's a function I've been using that I've put together from various threads around the net that removes everything, all tags and leaves you with a perfect phrase. Does anyone know how to modify this script to allow periods (.) ? In other words, leave everything 'as is' but leave the periods alone or other punctuation like and ! or a comma? let me know.

function stripAlpha( $item )

{

    $search     = array( 
         '@]*?>.*?@si'   // Strip out javascript 
        ,'@]*?>.*?@siU'    // Strip style tags properly 
        ,'@<[\/\!]*?[^<>]*?>@si'            // Strip out HTML tags
        ,'@@'         // Strip multi-line comments including CDATA
        ,'/\s{2,}/'
        ,'/(\s){2,}/'

    );

    $pattern    = array(

         '#[^a-zA-Z ]#'                     // Non alpha characters
        ,'/\s+/'                            // More than one whitespace

    );

    $replace    = array(
         ''
        ,' '

    );

    $item = preg_replace( $search, '', html_entity_decode( $item ) );
    $item = trim( preg_replace( $pattern, $replace, strip_tags( $item ) ) );
    return $item;

}