Jasongraphix

Strip It

I had a very specific idea of how I wanted the homepage on my site laid out. I wanted either the entire latest post front-and-center in my content area, and below that I wanted to have 2 columns with excerpts from the two previous posts. I know there’s probably a way to do this with Movable Type, but the easier solution to me seemed to be writing a PHP page that grabbed the info I needed from my Movable Type database.

The only problem with that concept was that I couldn’t use the excerpt tag if I wasn’t building the page through movable type. Well, I knew I could shorten the post to a specified number of characters by using the LEFT string function in my SQL query.

LEFT(mt_entry.entry_text, 500)

The only problem this left (no pun intended) was that I didn’t want to see any images, pre tags, links, etc. in these "Recollections". What I needed was a way to remove all the html from these strings. I was really close to writing a regular expression to do this when I ran across a very useful PHP function: strip_tags. With strip_tags, all I had to was change:

<?php echo $row_Recollection1['entry_text'];?>

to…

<?php echo strip_tags($row_Recollection1['entry_text']);?>