How can I keep HTML styling in a php form storing data in MySQL?

so I have a box where a user enters some data "a description" and it stores in MySQL. However, html tags such as <img src="">, <a href="">, etc. do not store there in the 'description' field. How can I allow certain HTML codes to be passed through to MySQL?

This is what the description input box looks like:

<?=form_textarea(
    'description',
    $Channels->description,
    'class="fiel开发者_如何学Pythond" style="width:306px; height: 70px; margin-left:5px;"'
)?>

This is where the form gets passed:

$this->form_validation->set_rules(
    'description',
    lang('user_edit_channel_description'),
    'trim|required|strip_tags|xss_clean'
);

And then posted to MySQL here:

$rows['description'] = $this->input->post('description');

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You will need to use the form of the strip_tags function with the second parameter, which allows you to specify which HTML tags are allowed. As explained in this post, you need to create a callback function to call because the two-parameter version of strip_tags cannot be directly used in set_rules(.

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You'll want to get rid of strip_tags from the validation rules, since that removes all HTML tags. Or, ever better, call the function separately using a second parameter to define what tags you want to allow.