Help: Formatting HTML with PHP

[Anarchonixx]

First of all, I don't know PHP well enough to write complex stuff, but I can generally understand PHP code when I see it. I know very basic stuff such as declaring variables, using includes, and basic interaction with MySQL databases, and I understand concepts of arrays, etc, from my basic C++ knowledge. I'm just looking for a nudge in the right direction (functions to use, and the like) or an example to help me with what I'm trying to do.

I have a page where I'm including a chunk of HTML from another page. It's just various news items that already contain HTML tags. I was wondering if it was possible by relatively easy means to edit the tags out, and format the text as I wish.

EDIT: I realize it's relatively easy to bastardize the HTML tags and beat them into submission via CSS, but that's not really an option I want to consider.~

Thanks beforehand.

 

[tim_m]

what i've used in the past are regular expressions. unfortunately they aren't exactly the easiest thing to understandthe first time around.

http://us2.php.net/pcre

 

[Antilles20]

There's a PHP function called "strip_tags" that is designed to remove HTML tags from a given string. I haven't used it extensively, but it seems to work pretty well whenever I do.

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php
(official PHP documentation on the function)

Hope this helps

 

[Anarchonixx]

thanks guys, both links were very helpful. Not only did I find a way to do what I was looking for (still needs some work, but I'm almost there), but also realized it's time to take some time to learn PHP properly instead of half-assing it and just learning the chunks I need when I need them.

 

[Veonik]

You might also want to try using XML and the expat library (or whatever you prefer..) instead of html for storing and retrieving news data and the like.