[RESOLVED] Having some problems with strip_tags()

jkurrle

Here is my issue: I have some text in an array at position 0. I want to strip all tags out except the tag. Instead, it's stripping out all tags, including the tag. Can anyone tell me why?

$bob=strip_tags($item_array[0],"<font>");
echo "<p> $bob </p>";

NogDog

Works OK for me:

<?php
header("Content-Type: text/plain");
$text = <<<EOD
<p>This is <font size="2">a test</font>. It is <i>only</i> <font color="red">a
test</font>. The end.</p>
EOD;

// before:
echo "$text\n\n";

// after:
echo strip_tags($text, '<font>');

Output:

<p>This is <font size="2">a test</font>. It is <i>only</i> <font color="red">a
test</font>. The end.</p>

This is <font size="2">a test</font>. It is only <font color="red">a
test</font>. The end.

jkurrle

From what I can tell, the code should work for me too! For some reason, it doesn't.

I've even done the following:

$bob=$item_array[0];
$bob=strip_tags($bob, '<font>');
echo "<p> $bob </p>";

I still can't get the tags to go through. This is really frustrating! Anyone else ever run into this???

NogDog

Are you sure there are font tags in $item_array[0]? You might want to echo it out before running it through the strip_tags() stuff just to make sure.

NogDog

PS: You're not using a PHP version older than 4.0.0, are you? (That's when the allowable tags parameter was added.)

jkurrle

The text is stored in a mysql table that is retrieved and displayed. It does have tags in it, which I can see when I bring the text up in a <textarea> box for editing.

PHP version is 4.4.4 running on FreeBSD version 6.2.

I was thinking maybe the quote marks were messing it up (example: ) but removing the quote marks altogether still did not let the tag through.

This is very baffling to me. It looks right, but still doesn't work...

NogDog

By any chance did you escape the angle brackets or convert them to HTML entities when you initially inserted them into the database? (You might want to do a "view source" of the current output to see if they are really "", or instead are "", or whatever the numeric code is for them.)

jkurrle

I just gave up and cheated. I changed the code to do a str_replace on [font and [/font to <font and </font. It let's me get my font tags across, as long as I format them correctly in my text...