Question

I am about to make a char counting function which counts input from a tinyMce textarea.
Server-side validation with code like this:

$string = "is<isvery interesting <thatthis willbe stripped";
$stripped = strip_tags($string);
$count = strlen($stripped); // This will return 2

You might notice that $string has no tag at all, anyway strip_tags() strips everything from the first less-than sign on.

Is this a bug or a feature?

Answer 1

This has been documented:

Because strip_tags() does not actually validate the HTML, partial or
broken tags can result in the removal of more text/data than expected.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php