Is there a way to force phpinfo() to output its stuff without formatting. Just like in CLI mode?

This function does a great job at converting phpinfo into an array.

function parse_phpinfo() {
    ob_start(); phpinfo(INFO_MODULES); $s = ob_get_contents(); ob_end_clean();
    $s = strip_tags($s, '<h2><th><td>');
    $s = preg_replace('/<th[^>]*>([^<]+)<\/th>/', '<info>\1</info>', $s);
    $s = preg_replace('/<td[^>]*>([^<]+)<\/td>/', '<info>\1</info>', $s);
    $t = preg_split('/(<h2[^>]*>[^<]+<\/h2>)/', $s, -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);
    $r = array(); $count = count($t);
    $p1 = '<info>([^<]+)<\/info>';
    $p2 = '/'.$p1.'\s*'.$p1.'\s*'.$p1.'/';
    $p3 = '/'.$p1.'\s*'.$p1.'/';
    for ($i = 1; $i < $count; $i++) {
        if (preg_match('/<h2[^>]*>([^<]+)<\/h2>/', $t[$i], $matchs)) {
            $name = trim($matchs[1]);
            $vals = explode("\n", $t[$i + 1]);
            foreach ($vals AS $val) {
                if (preg_match($p2, $val, $matchs)) { // 3cols
                    $r[$name][trim($matchs[1])] = array(trim($matchs[2]), trim($matchs[3]));
                } elseif (preg_match($p3, $val, $matchs)) { // 2cols
                    $r[$name][trim($matchs[1])] = trim($matchs[2]);
                }
            }
        }
    }
    return $r;
}

I just got done creating the composer library for this very purpose. Right now, it can parse the phpinfo() output when invoked from the command line, which was my use case.

Instead of using strip_tags() or any clever trick, I just worked my way backwards from everything that the original function did.

You can use the library like so:

<?php
include_once('vendor/autoload.php');

ob_start();
phpinfo();
$phpinfoAsString = ob_get_contents();
ob_get_clean();

$phpInfo = new OutCompute\PHPInfo\PHPInfo();
$phpInfo->setText($phpinfoAsString);
var_export($phpInfo->get());
?>

You can access keys within modules and elsewhere:

echo $phpInfoArray['Configuration']['bz2']['BZip2 Support']; # Will output 'Enabled' if enabled

or

echo $phpInfoArray['Thread Safety'] # Will output 'disabled' if disabled.

There are some good examples of converting the information into an array on the PHP.net site.

Here is the best example. You could loop through that array to display it in whatever way you'd like.