Question

I am having a text area in my UI and I would like to filter out all xml(including html) text entered by user using preg_replace. I need a some help with it.

Eg:

Emailed user sam at 12:15 PM
<details><email>[e-mail]</email></details>

After preg_replace :

Emailed user sam at 12:15 PM

Along with this any pointers to preg_replace regex would be great. I tried using some java regex(I am new to PHP) in preg_replace and found that it did not work. I am not sure if my regex was wrong or preg_replace uses different kind of regex.

All your help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

mixed preg_replace ( mixed $pattern , mixed $replacement , mixed $subject [, int $limit = -1 [, int &$count ]] )

So something like the following will work in most cases,

$str_out = preg_replace('/<[\/]{0,1}\w[^>]*>/g', '', $str_in);

Where '/<[\/]{0,1}\w[^>]*>/g' is regex for <name stuff> and </name stuff>. It will fail if you’ve a > in an attribute (i.e. <name blah=">hello"> will result in hello">

Although strip_tags is native so will be faster. Remember the arguments for strip_tags are the things to not strip

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EDIT: If you want the content between the tags stripped out too, the regex for that is '/<\w[^>]*>[\s\S]*?<\/\w[^>]*>/g', but this will fail in even more situations (i.e. badly closed/nested tags), so you might want to run it first then the above on the result to make sure.

EDIT: Spelling