I can not use PHP's strip_tags function with another function

Question

I have a problem with PHP's strip_tags function. I have a list which includes a whitelist for html tags. That list is generated from a function like:

 setAllowedHtmlTags();

and output for this function is:

 "<a><table><br>"

I want to eliminate other html tags but this. Therefore I use strip_tags function as follows:

 echo strip_tags("sample text", setAllowedHtmlTags());

And here is my function:

function setAllowedHtmlTags()
{
    $db     = new PDO('mysql:host=' . host . ';dbname=' . DBNAME_SCHEMA, user, password);
    $sql    = "SELECT html_tag FROM allowed_html_tags_table";
    $query  = $db->query($sql);

    $tagList = "";

    if ($query->rowCount()){
        foreach($query as $row){
            $tagList .= $row['html_tag'];
        }
    }

    return htmlentities($tagList);
}

But it does not work. strip_tags function removes all html tags including mines in my whitelist. Can you please help me solve this issue?

Answer 1

Does your function setAllowedHtmlTags() really return what you told us? Try a var_dump(setAllowedHtmlTags()); to see what the function really returns.

Or maybe you wanted to call getAllowedHtmlTags()?

Answer 2

Ok I found the problem, returning the value with html_entity_decode() function instead htmlentities() function worked for me.