Strip out HTML and Special Characters

Question

I'd like to use any php function or whatever so that i can remove any HTML code and special characters and gives me only alpha-numeric output

$des = "Hello world)<b> (*&^%$#@! it's me: and; love you.<p>"; 

I want the output become Hello world it s me and love you (just Aa-Zz-0-9-WhiteSpace)

I've tried strip_tags but it removes only HTML codes

$clear = strip_tags($des);  echo $clear; 

So is there any way to do it?

Answer 1

Probably better here for a regex replace

// Strip HTML Tags $clear = strip_tags($des); // Clean up things like & $clear = html_entity_decode($clear); // Strip out any url-encoded stuff $clear = urldecode($clear); // Replace non-AlNum characters with space $clear = preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9]/', ' ', $clear); // Replace Multiple spaces with single space $clear = preg_replace('/ +/', ' ', $clear); // Trim the string of leading/trailing space $clear = trim($clear); 

Or, in one go

$clear = trim(preg_replace('/ +/', ' ', preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9 ]/', ' ', urldecode(html_entity_decode(strip_tags($des)))))); 

Answer 2

Strip out tags, leave only alphanumeric characters and space:

$clear = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/', '', strip_tags($des)); 

Edit: all credit to DaveRandom for the perfect solution...

$clear = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/', '', strip_tags(html_entity_decode($des)));