php - Finding substring whilst ignoring HTML tags

Question

I need to match parts of string whilst ignoring HTML tags. Which means if user wants to look for string "foo and foo1" in source code.

Two strings, <u>foo</u> and foo1

He'd not get the match, because of the tags.

I've tried regex, but since the tags can and don't have to be there, it seems rather too complicated.

It's not server-side script. It'd be an application run from console.

To be more specific: it is for syntax highlight. So user wants "foo and foo1" to be italic, but part of it is already underline and wouldn't match anyway. That's why I can't strip the string.

Answer 1

Use the PHP function strip_tags to remove the HTML tags from the text. Then do your search.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php