Question

When a user save a text from a textarea:

bfajsdb fkjasdfasjkdfasdfasdf asdf asdf sdf

asdfasdfasdfasdf asd asdf asdf 

sdfasdfasdf

from a textarea using nl2br_except_pre function in codeignter it saves it in the database like :

bfajsdb fkjasdfasjkdfasdfasdf asdf asdf sdf
<br>
asdfasdfasdfasdf asd asdf asdf 
<br>
sdfasdfasdf

It is nice for output in div or p tags. or in html output in general.

However, when repoopulating inside textarea again it shows the
tags, which is ugly and confuse the user.

How can I sanitize the output before repopulating the saved value from database so it looks in the textarea like this:

bfajsdb fkjasdfasjkdfasdfasdf asdf asdf sdf

asdfasdfasdfasdf asd asdf asdf 

sdfasdfasdf

and not like this:

bfajsdb fkjasdfasjkdfasdfasdf asdf asdf sdf
<br>
asdfasdfasdfasdf asd asdf asdf 
<br>
sdfasdfasdf

Answer 1

Well, the crude answer will be ‘just use strip_tags‘:

$raw_textarea = 'bfajsdb fkjasdfasjkdfasdfasdf asdf asdf sdf
<br>
asdfasdfasdfasdf asd asdf asdf 
<br>
sdfasdfasdf';

$clean_textarea = strip_tags($raw_textarea);
echo $clean_textarea;

But, in fact, there’s much more to that: perhaps you need to worry about sanitizing your output, not just cleaning out irrelevant tags. I suggest reading this discussion on that topic.