How can I strip HTML from the output on a search/results page generated with iRite?

I have a new site that uses the iRite Editor for content management behind the scenes. On all of the site pages, the output is perfect. However, when I run an internal search on the web site content and the results page shows up, a bunch of the HTML characters are also showing up in the results list. I believe I know why, but I don't know how to fix it.

I want the page title and only the first 50 characters of the page content field to show up in the results list. This is what I have for my code:

<?php echo $row_getData['pageTitle']; ?>
<br />
<?php echo substr($row_getData['pageContent'],1,50); ?>

It's the page content field that is getting garbled with the HTML characters, and I'm sure it's because of how I'm outputting it. Any ideas on how I can fix this?

The page content field stores the HTML content for your page. You can fairly easily remove the "<" and ">" Characters, but this will still leave the tag names. For example "<p>" would become "p". it will be pretty problematic to remove _all_ HTML tags from the page content.


The following is an example of how to remove all instances of the "<p>" tag and the "<br />" tag:


<?php echo substr(str_replace("<br />", "", str_replace("<p>", "", $row_getData['pageContent'])),1,50); ?>

Thanks, Jason. I see what you mean about not stripping all the HTML, though. Would it be better perhaps, to do it on the database level, within the MySQL query itself? How do you think that would work?

Jason, I actually just used the left function within the query itself and it seems to be working fine now. Thanks!