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( 
         '@<script[^>]*?>.*?</script>@si'   // Strip out javascript 
        ,'@<style[^>]*?>.*?</style>@siU'    // Strip style tags properly 
        ,'@<[\/\!]*?[^<>]*?>@si'            // Strip out HTML tags
        ,'@<![\s\S]*?–[ \t\n\r]*>@'         // 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;

}

Answer 2

You can do it in one single line :) specially useful for GET or POST requests

$clear = preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9\-]/', '', urldecode($_GET['id']));

Answer 3

preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/', '',$string) this is using for removing special character only rather than space between the strings.

Answer 4

Probably better here for a regex replace

// Strip HTML Tags
$clear = strip_tags($des);
// Clean up things like &
$clear = html_entity_decode($clear);
// Strip out any url-encoded stuff
$clear = urldecode($clear);
// Replace non-AlNum characters with space
$clear = preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9]/', ' ', $clear);
// Replace Multiple spaces with single space
$clear = preg_replace('/ +/', ' ', $clear);
// Trim the string of leading/trailing space
$clear = trim($clear);

Or, in one go

$clear = trim(preg_replace('/ +/', ' ', preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9 ]/', ' ', urldecode(html_entity_decode(strip_tags($des))))));

Answer 5

Strip out tags, leave only alphanumeric characters and space:

$clear = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/', '', strip_tags($des));

Edit: all credit to DaveRandom for the perfect solution...

$clear = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/', '', strip_tags(html_entity_decode($des)));

Answer 6

All the other solutions are creepy because they are from someone that arrogantly simply thinks that English is the only language in the world :)

All those solutions strip also diacritics like ç or à.

The perfect solution, as stated in PHP documentation, is simply:

$clear = strip_tags($des);