Convert HTML To ASCII With PHP

The reverse of turning ASCII text into HTML is to convert HTML into ASCII. And to this end here is a little function that does this.

function html2ascii($s){


 // convert links


 $s = preg_replace('/]*)"?[^>]*>(.*?)/i','$2 ($1)',$s);


 


 // convert p, br and hr tags


 $s = preg_replace('@]*>@i',"\n",$s);


 $s = preg_replace('@]*>@i',"\n\n",$s);


 $s = preg_replace('@]*>(.*)@i',"\n".'$1'."\n",$s);  


 


 // convert bold and italic tags


 $s = preg_replace('@]*>(.*?)@i','*$1*',$s);


 $s = preg_replace('@]*>(.*?)@i','*$1*',$s);


 $s = preg_replace('@]*>(.*?)@i','_$1_',$s);


 $s = preg_replace('@]*>(.*?)@i','_$1_',$s);


 


 // decode any entities


 $s = strtr($s,array_flip(get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES)));


 


 // decode numbered entities


 $s = preg_replace('/(\d+);/e','chr(str_replace(";","",str_replace("","","$0")))',$s);


 


 // strip any remaining HTML tags


 $s = strip_tags($s);


 


 // return the string


 return $s;


}

To use this function just pass it a string. Here is an example of it at work.

$htmlString = '<p>This is some <strong>XHTML</strong> markup that <em>will</em> be<br />turned <a href="http://www.hashbangcode.com/" title="#! code">into</a> an ascii string</p>';


 


echo html2ascii($htmlString);

Produces the following output.

This is some *XHTML* markup that _will_ be


turned into (http://www.hashbangcode.com/) an ascii string