remove script tag from HTML content

A simple way by manipulating string.

function stripStr($str, $ini, $fin)
{
    while (($pos = mb_stripos($str, $ini)) !== false) {
        $aux = mb_substr($str, $pos + mb_strlen($ini));
        $str = mb_substr($str, 0, $pos);
        
        if (($pos2 = mb_stripos($aux, $fin)) !== false) {
            $str .= mb_substr($aux, $pos2 + mb_strlen($fin));
        }
    }

    return $str;
}

Use the PHP DOMDocument parser.

$doc = new DOMDocument();

// load the HTML string we want to strip
$doc->loadHTML($html);

// get all the script tags
$script_tags = $doc->getElementsByTagName('script');

$length = $script_tags->length;

// for each tag, remove it from the DOM
for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i++) {
  $script_tags->item($i)->parentNode->removeChild($script_tags->item($i));
}

// get the HTML string back
$no_script_html_string = $doc->saveHTML();

This worked me me using the following HTML document:

<!doctype html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <title>
            hey
        </title>
        <script>
            alert("hello");
        </script>
    </head>
    <body>
        hey
    </body>
</html>

Just bear in mind that the DOMDocument parser requires PHP 5 or greater.


$html = <<<HTML
...
HTML;
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$tags_to_remove = array('script','style','iframe','link');
foreach($tags_to_remove as $tag){
    $element = $dom->getElementsByTagName($tag);
    foreach($element  as $item){
        $item->parentNode->removeChild($item);
    }
}
$html = $dom->saveHTML();

Because this question is tagged with regex I'm going to answer with poor man's solution in this situation:

$html = preg_replace('#<script(.*?)>(.*?)</script>#is', '', $html);

However, regular expressions are not for parsing HTML/XML, even if you write the perfect expression it will break eventually, it's not worth it, although, in some cases it's useful to quickly fix some markup, and as it is with quick fixes, forget about security. Use regex only on content/markup you trust.

Remember, anything that user inputs should be considered not safe.

Better solution here would be to use DOMDocument which is designed for this. Here is a snippet that demonstrate how easy, clean (compared to regex), (almost) reliable and (nearly) safe is to do the same:

<?php

$html = <<<HTML
...
HTML;

$dom = new DOMDocument();

$dom->loadHTML($html);

$script = $dom->getElementsByTagName('script');

$remove = [];
foreach($script as $item)
{
  $remove[] = $item;
}

foreach ($remove as $item)
{
  $item->parentNode->removeChild($item); 
}

$html = $dom->saveHTML();

I have removed the HTML intentionally because even this can bork.