striptags vs. htmlentities

Forgot to state that strip_tags deletes the HTML tags as well as any text within them

striptags only remove the HTML tags, even after you remove the tags, you might end up with text containing symbols that could mess up the HTML code like < or > in a sentence. Also if you have unicode characters or some thing outside the standard printable ASCII range, you will need to use htmlenties.

Thanks for your response. I am still a little foggy on how I should go about this.

I am receiving user input such as a paragraph in a textarea, inputting it into a database and displaying it back on a web page.

If strip_tags can be easily fooled, maybe I should forget about that function.

Does htmlentities stop javascript, php or any kind of xss?

I am using pdo and prepared statements.

If you are getting the HTML from user and displaying it on the page, it's best to strip out any javascript tags using regular expression. Something like /<script[^>]*>(.*)</script>/i maybe? (not tested)

If you want to display the content with the formatting user entered, you should not use htmlentities.

I hope I am not causing confusion.

I am just trying to receive text from the user, not html. If the user inputs html such as <script>, I thought htmlentities would change < and > to entities, thus rendering a script tag useless.

If that is so, then I would not need a regex like you described above correct?

Thanks so much for your help. I think I am starting to understand this a little better.

Glad to help. Thanks for the points.