Stripping HTML Special Characters from RSS Feed

When creating RSS feed files, removing HTML tags using PHP's strip_tags function is common practice. However, this function often fails to remove HTML special code characters like  , &, and ©.

To effectively remove these characters, consider the following options:

Option 1: Using html_entity_decode

You can use html_entity_decode to decode these characters back to their original forms.

$decodedContent = html_entity_decode($originalContent);

Option 2: Using preg_replace

Alternatively, you can use preg_replace with a regular expression to remove the characters directly:

$cleanContent = preg_replace("/&#?[a-z0-9] ;/i","",$originalContent);

This pattern matches HTML special characters represented as numeric entities (  for example) or named entities ( ).

Alternative Pattern

To improve the accuracy of the replacement, consider using the following modified pattern, as suggested by Jacco:

$cleanContent = preg_replace("/&#?[a-z0-9]{2,8};/i","",$originalContent);

This pattern limits the replacement to entities with 2 to 8 characters, reducing the risk of unintended replacements.