Comments on: Cleaning up HTML

By: dusoft

dusoft — Fri, 16 Apr 2004 14:20:32 +0000

Check out Content management system Absolut Engine
It produces valid XHTML Strict from WYSIWYG editor!

By: Dougal

Dougal — Mon, 10 Mar 2003 14:19:04 +0000

I already use the strip_tags() function (with the optional array of allowed tags). But it doesn't do anything to help close unbalanced tags, or to strip out attempts to insert javascript urls (unless you disallow links altogether).

I'm still mulling the problem over. Another solution might be to use something like BBCode, or a Wiki-like syntax.

By: Sean "XariusX" Maddison

Sean "XariusX" Maddison — Mon, 10 Mar 2003 13:22:26 +0000

Try this:

$foo = strip_tags($foo)

then

$foo = nl2br($foo)

This will remove ALL HTML tags and format all newlines to

If thats what you are after anyway.

By: Dougal

Dougal — Fri, 28 Feb 2003 18:50:15 +0000

Yes, I had run across phpTidyHt earlier today. I'm definitely going to take a look at it, though I still hope to find a solution that doesn't require a sytem call to an external program.

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 28 Feb 2003 18:37:04 +0000

This looks like a working demo. I suspect they’re just passing it through the command line, which is what I’d recommend as the easiest solution as well.

By: Dougal

Dougal — Fri, 28 Feb 2003 11:50:08 +0000

I thought I had heard something about a native way to call Tidy from PHP, and I did do a search at php.net, but that came up empty. I just didn’t have time to cast my net wider yet.

By: Danny

Danny — Fri, 28 Feb 2003 09:14:40 +0000

The ‘standard’ tool for cleaning HTML (which can output XHTML) is HTML Tidy from the W3C (by Dave Raggett originally, I think) – I’m pretty sure you’ll find a PHP interface with a bit of googling. I use this both as a desktop app and (Java version) embedded in code, and its results really do seem magical at times.