Cleanup HTML with PHP to create clean string

Question

I've got a bunch of HTML data that I'm writing to a PDF file using PHP. In the PDF, I want all of the HTML to be stripped and cleaned up. So for instance: ```

First list item
Second list item which is quite a bit longer
List item with apostrophe 's 's

``` Should become: ``` First list item Second list item which is quite a bit longer List item with apostrophe 's 's ``` However, if I simply use `strip_tags()`, I get something like this: ``` First list item  Second list item which is quite a bit longer  List item with apostrophe ’s ’s ``` Also note the indentation of the output. Any tips on how to properly cleanup the HTML to nice, clean strings without messy whitespace and odd characters? Thanks :)

Accepted Answer

you can decode the result of strip_tags using html_entity_decode or remove them using preg_replace:

```
$text = strip_tags($html_text);
$content = preg_replace("/&#?[a-z0-9]{2,8};/i","",$text );
```

and to remove white spaces from the beginning of your lines use ltrim:

```
$content = join("
", array_map("ltrim", explode("
", $content )));
```

to keep apostrophes use this instead:

```
$text = strip_tags($html_text);
$text = str_replace("&rsquo;","'", $text); 
$content = preg_replace("/&#?[a-z0-9]{2,8};/i","",$text );
```

Cleanup HTML with PHP to create clean string

Solution

Problem