php - Limit input length of text that contains HTML tags

Question

I have a php web sites in wich I can manages articles. On the Add a new article form, there is a rich-text-box (allows HTML input) that I'd like to limit the character input count. I check on the server side so using the strlen()^­Docs method.

The problem is strlen seems to give a number that is way too big. I tried to use html_entity_decode()^­Docs to get the html tags out of the string but still the string length resulting seems to be wrong.

Answer 1

html_entity_decode only decodes HTML entities, it doesn't ignore HTML tags. Try:

strlen(strip_tags(html_entity_decode($string)));

Or the multi-byte equivalent:

mb_strlen(strip_tags(html_entity_decode($string)), 'auto');