Finding html tags in text

[peteraub]

Hi,
I have a textarea on webpage which is WYSIWYG html editor. This will only work in IE5.5+ browsers. This means that if someone uses the form from a different browser it will update the database as plain text without the html tags.

What I want to do is to be able to distinguish which text has the tags in it and which hasn't. This is so I can use nl2br() function for non html text. If I use this with the html tags it creates extra line breaks and if I don't use it with the plain text I don't get any line breaks.

Can anyone help me
Thanks
Peter

[bubblenut]

match opening/closing tag pairs

preg_match('/<([a-zA-Z0-9]+)[^>]*>.*?<\/\\1>/',$string);

match on the presence of any tag

preg_match('/<[^>]+>/',$string);

HTH
Bubble