Talk In Code

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('/<a\s+.*?href="?([^\" >]*)"?[^>]*>(.*?)<\/a>/i','$2 ($1)',$s);
 
 // convert p, br and hr tags
 $s = preg_replace('@<(b|h)r[^>]*>@i',"\n",$s);
 $s = preg_replace('@<p[^>]*>@i',"\n\n",$s);
 $s = preg_replace('@<div[^>]*>(.*)</div>@i',"\n".'$1'."\n",$s);
 
 // convert bold and italic tags
 $s = preg_replace('@<b[^>]*>(.*?)</b>@i','*$1*',$s);
 $s = preg_replace('@<strong[^>]*>(.*?)</strong>@i','*$1*',$s);
 $s = preg_replace('@<i[^>]*>(.*?)</i>@i','_$1_',$s);
 $s = preg_replace('@<em[^>]*>(.*?)</em>@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.talkincode.com/" title="Talk in 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.talkincode.com/) an ascii string