Remove a specific tag from php string

Sometimes we come to the situation when we need to strip one specific HTML tag from a string and the PHP function strip_tags() doesn’t work the way we want it to.

strip_tags() allows for certain exclusions, but why would we use that when we only want to exclude one tag and include all other tags? Especially when we can use preg_replace().

Here is a quick little function. It takes two parameters, the tag to be removed and the string from which it is to be removed.

  function strip_single($tag,$string){
    $string=preg_replace('/<'.$tag.'[^>]*>/i', '', $string);
    $string=preg_replace('/<\/'.$tag.'>/i', '', $string);
    return $string;
  } 

Call function like this :

$result = strip_single('a',$string);

It will remove all <a> tags from string.