how to remove speacial characters from a string in php?

Question

i am working on a php site

from the admin panel i am updating the data of content to be shown on a page using wysig editor

which add <p> </p> by default has opening and closing tags while inserting in mysql table

and when i show it on pages it comes has

        <?> with some black bakground

along the content why so how can i remove or filter it dynamically while pulling records

for example

      // content goes in to website
      $ a = "<p> this content </p>" ;

i wana display it has

         "this content" 

any help will be appreciated

Answer 1

Try This

$a = "<p> this content </p>" ;
$var = strip_tags($a);
echo $var

Answer 2

If you only need to remove HTML tags, you should use strip_tags().

http://php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php