PHP: How can I disable HTML content in user content?

Question

I am launching a niche social networking site. I would like to ban HTML content in posts posted by the user; e.g. embedded videos etc. what option is there in php to clear this before I insert in db.

Answer 1

There are three main solutions:

• Remove all HTML tags from the message. In PHP, you can do this with the strip_tags() function.
• Encode all characters, so if the user types in <b>hello</b> , it is displayed as <b>hello</b> . In PHP, this is htmlspecialchars() . (Note: in this situation, you usually save the content in the database as is, and use htmlspecialchars wherever you output the content.)
• Use a sanitizer for HTML, such as an HTML cleaner . This allows users to use certain HTML formatting, such as bold / italics, but blocks malicious Javascript and any other tags that you want (i.e. <object> in your case).

Answer 2

You can use the strip_tags() function.