php: why   is not stripped

Question

Why   is not stripped in strip_tags() ? Other than str_replace() any other possibilities?

Answer 1

Well, it's not a tag :)

Also, yeah, html_entity_decode is the way to go.

Answer 2

Unlike HTML tags, entities (such as < or   ) represent actual characters.
If you strip all entities from a piece of HTML, you'll ned up stripping all < characters, as well as any other characters that were included as entities.

You need to decode the entities into the characters that they represent, using the html_entity_decode function.

Answer 3

strip_tags() will not remove html entities

Not sure what you are trying to achieve, but would html_entity_decode() work for you? It will turn & nbsp ; into a non-breaking space.

Answer 4

It's not stripped because, according to the documentation it only strips the tags.   isn't a tag, it's an entity character code. You could use html_entity_decode