striptags

Striptags is a function or tool commonly found in programming languages and web development frameworks. Its primary purpose is to remove HTML and XML tags from a given string of text. This is often necessary when displaying user-generated content or data that might contain markup, but you only want to show the plain text.

For example, if a user enters "This is a <b>bold</b> statement.", striptags would process it and return "This is a bold statement.". The tags like `<b>` and `</b>` are removed, leaving only the content.

The implementation of striptags can vary. Some versions might be very basic, simply looking for and deleting any characters between `<` and `>`. More sophisticated versions might offer options to preserve certain tags, such as links (`<a>`) or images (`<img>`), or to escape tags, converting them into their entity equivalents (e.g., `<b>` becomes `&lt;b&gt;`) rather than removing them entirely.

Striptags is a security measure, particularly against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. By stripping potentially malicious HTML or JavaScript code embedded within tags, it helps sanitize user input and prevent it from being executed in a user's browser. It is a fundamental tool for ensuring the integrity and safety of web applications.