How to remove HTML escape sequence characters from the string in PHP?

Question

Suppose, I've a following string variable containing such kind of string.

$sample_String = "Dummy User graded your comment \"\r\n\t\t\t\t\tdoc_ck.docx\r\n\t\t\t\t\tDownload\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\" that you posted.";

Now I don't want these HTML characters in my string.

How should I remove them in an efficient and reliable way? I want the final output string as follows :

$sample_String = "Dummy User graded your comment \"doc_ck.docx Download\" that you posted.";

When it will be shown in a browser the '\' appearing before " will get disappear and the string in a browser will look like below :

Dummy User graded your comment "doc_ck.docx Download" that you posted.

Isn't it?

Thanks.

Till now I've tried below code but no success :

function br2nl($buff = '') {
    $buff = mb_convert_encoding($buff, 'HTML-ENTITIES', "UTF-8");
    $buff = preg_replace('#<br[/\s]*>#si', "\n", $buff);
    $buff = trim($buff);

    return $buff;
  }
$sample_String = br2nl(stripslashes(strip_tags($sample_String)));

Those aren't HTML entities, but C escapes. With [`stripcslashes`](http://php.net/stripcslashes) one could recover the original characters. Or strip them per regex (before or afterwards). — mario, Aug 31 '15 at 12:07
@mario : Please check my updated question with the code I tried. — PHPLover, Aug 31 '15 at 12:12
Sorry. This makes it even more unclear as to what's going on. Where does the input string originate from now? How does it really look? (`var_dump` as block text). Or is the `$sample_String = "…";` assignment how it literally looks in your code? (Because then the escapes would already be expanded). -- More context please. (Imagine you had to guess what the purpose is..) — mario, Aug 31 '15 at 12:21

Halcyon · Accepted Answer · 2015-08-31T12:12:32.843

2

If you just want to remove \r (carrige return) \n (newline) and \t (tab) you can do:

$string = "Dummy User graded your comment \"\r\n\t\t\t\t\tdoc_ck.docx\r\n\t\t\t\t\tDownload\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\" that you posted.";
$string = str_replace(array("\r", "\n", "\t"), "", $string);

If you want to preserve the newlines (and have them show up in the browser) do:

$string = "Dummy User graded your comment \"\r\n\t\t\t\t\tdoc_ck.docx\r\n\t\t\t\t\tDownload\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\" that you posted.";
$string = nl2br(str_replace(array("\r", "\t"), "", $string));

HTMLentities are sequences like " and ?

edited Aug 31 '15 at 12:12

answered Aug 31 '15 at 12:11

Halcyon

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Please check my updated question with the code I tried. – PHPLover Aug 31 '15 at 12:12

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 31 '15 at 12:15

1

Use a regex like so:

<?php
$str = "Dummy User graded your comment \"\r\n\t\t\t\t\tdoc_ck.docx\r\n\t\t\t\t\tDownload\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\" that you posted.";
echo preg_replace('/[\r\n\t]+/m','',$str);

answered Aug 31 '15 at 12:15

user2182349

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How to remove HTML escape sequence characters from the string in PHP?

2 Answers2