escaping html tags and reading only the text in php?

Question

I was wondering is there a way to escape all html tags from a a bunch of html code, and extract only the text i.e.

<strong>this is strong</strong>
<br />
<h1> this is a header</h1>

and I want to get the text between the tags only, so basically only this is strong this is a header

Answer 1

$text = '<p>Test paragraph.</p><!-- Comment --> <a href="#fragment">Other text</a>';
echo strip_tags($text);

One of the things I love about PHP...thoughtful functions for web developers.

Answer 2

Use strip_tags() like this:

$html = "<strong>this is strong</strong><br />\n".
        "<h1> this is a header</h1>";
$text = strip_tags($html);