Remove all tags - help

[Lc3]

I'm trying to remove tags in a given string for example:

 

Testing... <b>Hello</b> <img src="something.jpg" /> World!

should become

Testing... Hello  World!

 

And I'm trying this code:

 

preg_replace('<.*?>', '', $subject)

 

but it always returns the empty string. What did I do wrong?  ???

[Mchl]

strip_tags

[Lc3]

Okay so it was a case of KISS then? stip_tags() works, thanks.

 

P.S. For the record, can anyone tell me why my preg_replace() attempt was broken? So I can learn for next time that I actually *DO* need to use regex.

[.josh]

You don't have any delimiters in your regex (the thing that tells pcre where the beginning and end of the pattern is, like /../).  You should have gotten an error message from that, so maybe you have error reporting turned off.  Other than that, it should have worked.  Another way to write it is like so:

 

echo preg_replace("/<[^>]*>/","",$string);

 

[nrg_alpha]

You don't have any delimiters in your regex (the thing that tells pcre where the beginning and end of the pattern is, like /../).  You should have gotten an error message from that, so maybe you have error reporting turned off.

 

Nope.. that pattern is correct syntactically. Delimiters pairs can be < and >.. but of course, the end result is that only everything inside those are considered the pattern. In fact, it is perfectly acceptable to use opening punctuation such as {, (, < and [.. but then the opposite (closing) corrosponding punctuation marks must be used to successfully close delimitation..

 

To the OP, This is why it is not advisable to use such characters as delimiters, and instead stick to stuff like /, #, ! or ~ as some 'safer' examples... otherwise you fall into one of those regex 'gotchas' that leave you scatching your head and wondering why your regex solution isn't working.

[RussellReal]

/(<[^>]+?>|^[^<]+?>|<[^>]+?$)/