Strip forum code from a string.

[HairyArse]

Hey guys

Can anyone tell me how to go about stripping forum code from a string?

What I am trying to do is post the ten most recent posts on my forum but without any quoted text at the start.

Quoted text is denoted by:

[QUOTE]Text[/QUOTE]More text

And so basically I want to display the above without the quoted text.

Any ideas?

[Ashley_Sheridan]

There's two ways you can go about this:

First, you could use the preg_replace() function to replace the BBCode:

<?php
$string = '[quote]This is a quote[/quote]';
$pattern = '/\[[\/a-z]+\]/i';
$replacement = '';
echo preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $string);
?>

You might need to tweak it for the BBCode tags with have attributes, like images, etc.

The second method is to replace all the [ and ] characters with < and > then just use the strip_tags() function to remove the resulting HTML tags:

<?php
$string = '[quote]This is a quote[/quote]';
$find = Array('[',']');
$replace = Array('<','>');
$new_string = str_replace($find, $replace, $string);
$new_string = strip_tags($new_string);
?>

[HairyArse]

I might be reading your answer wrong but the problem is not in removing the BB Code, it's in removing the text in the middle of the BB code as well.

[Ashley_Sheridan]

Oh, you want to remove content within the BBCode tags as well? If so, then you should use the regular expression method, but change the expression to

$pattern = '/\[[\/a-z]+\][^\[]\[\/[a-z]+\]/i';