How to remove HTML tags in PHP using regular expressions

In web development, HTML is an essential element. But sometimes we need to extract plain text from HTML without HTML tags. At this time, regular expressions are a very convenient tool.

In PHP, you can use the preg_replace() function to remove HTML tags. The usage of this function is as follows:

preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $subject);

Among them, $pattern is the regular expression pattern, $replacement is the replacement string, and $subject is the string to be processed. Note that both $pattern and $replacement can be arrays, as discussed below.

Next, we will discuss several common regular expressions for removing HTML tags.

1. Remove HTML tags

$pattern = '/<[^>]*>/';
$replacement = '';
$text = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $html);

In this regular expression, < represents the left angle bracket, ¹ represents Matches any character except the right angle bracket, * means match 0 or more times. Therefore, this expression will match any HTML tag and replace it with the null character.

2. Remove script tags

$pattern = '/<script[^>]*>(.*?)</script>/is';
$replacement = '';
$text = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $html);

This regular expression will match any text with a