More often than not, programmers are faced with the challenge of stripping all HTML content from a document, leaving only plain text. While PHP provides functions for stripping tags out of (X)HTML documents (i.e. strip_tags, fgetss), they don’t strip all the unwanted bits of documents (such as the text between the <script> and </script> tags). Looking for a solution to this problem, I found a nifty one, originally posted by uersoy at tnn dot net, that deals with the text inside <script>, <style>, comments, as well as regular tags.

<?php
function get_plain_text($document){
$search = array(‘@<script[^>]*?>.*?</script>@si’, // Strip out javascript
‘@<style[^>]*?>.*?</style>@siU’, // Strip style tags properly
‘@<[\/\!]*?[^<>]*?>@si’, // Strip out HTML tags
‘@<![\s\S]*?–[ \t\n\r]*>@’ // Strip multi-line comments including CDATA
);
$text = preg_replace($search, ”, $document);
return $text;
}
?>

This function will strip all unwanted stuff from your document and should you need to keep some of it, you just modify the regular expression list (on $search). Still, if you only want to get rid of just some HTML tags, you should use PHP’s native functions, as they’re way faster and more flexible.

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This function takes a URL and returns a plain-text version of the page. It uses cURL to retrieve the page and a combination of regular expressions to strip all unwanted whitespace. This function will even strip the text from STYLE and SCRIPT tags, which are ignored by PHP functions such as strip_tags (they strip only the tags, leaving the text in the middle intact).

Regular expressions were split in 2 stages, to avoid deleting single carriage returns (also matched by \s) but still delete all blank lines and multiple linefeeds or spaces, trimming operations took place in 2 stages.

function webpage2txt($url)
{
$user_agent = “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)”;

$ch = curl_init(); // initialize curl handle
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); // set url to post to
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, 1); // Fail on errors
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1); // allow redirects
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1); // return into a variable
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PORT, 80); //Set the port number
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 15); // times out after 15s

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $user_agent);

$document = curl_exec($ch);

$search = array(’@<script[^>]*?>.*?</script>@si’, // Strip out javascript
‘@<style[^>]*?>.*?</style>@siU’, // Strip style tags properly
‘@<[\/\!]*?[^<>]*?>@si’, // Strip out HTML tags
‘@<![\s\S]*?–[ \t\n\r]*>@’, // Strip multi-line comments including CDATA
‘/\s{2,}/’,

);

$text = preg_replace($search, “\n”, html_entity_decode($document));

$pat[0] = “/^\s+/”;
$pat[2] = “/\s+\$/”;
$rep[0] = “”;
$rep[2] = ” “;

$text = preg_replace($pat, $rep, trim($text));

return $text;
}

Potential uses of this function are extracting keywords from a webpage, counting words and things like that. If you find it useful, drop us a comment and let us know where you used it.

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Here is a small helper file for the CakePHP framework that will help you turn a subject into the pluralized form depending on a parameter. Here is the code:

<?php

    class PluralHelper extends Helper{

        function ize($s, $c){

            if($c==0 || $c>1) {

                $inflect = new Inflector();

                return $c . ' ' . $inflect->pluralize($s);

            } else{

                return $c . ' ' . $s;

            }

        }

    }

?>

Save the code into a file called “plural.php” and place it in app/views/helpers/. After you activated the helper in your controller(s), you can use it as follows in your views:

echo $plural-ize('article', count($articles));

..which will output “article” if the second parameter is 1, or “articles” if it is 0 or > 1. This is neat to display text as in “You have writte SOME_NUM article(s) already”. You get the idea. It uses Cake’s Infelctor class, so that special cases like “baby/babies” are taken care of as well.

One note: If you have a CommonHelper already, it would be good to copy the code into a “pluralize” method in the CommonHelper instead. Why? Because as of now the PluralHelper only has this one method and there does not justify to be a class on its own

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