str_replace not working when text together

This might be a noob question but when I do

str_replace("<P id=description>", "", $content);

this is part of the $content <P id=description>ஈழ but I cannot get rid of this, and I 开发者_高级运维get the same problem when i try to replace the ம்</P> using str_replace("</P>", " ", $content); but it works when the </P> has space in between, and when I try preg_match_all "'<(.*?)>'si"; i dont get those tags.

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When you are working with multibyte strings you might want to use functions that are for multibyte strings, like mb_ereg_replace.

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strings has to match!

$content = '<P id=eow-description>ஈழ';
str_replace("<P id=eow-description>", "", $content);

will work...

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Based on your comments use strip_tags() (linked) to remove all the HTML from the document.