Strip links from the_content

Question

I'm trying to strip all the a href tags from the_content(); when displayed on the front end. If I use get_the_content(); and preg_replace it works fine, however, get_the_content doesn't show formatting such as <p> etc. When used with the_content();, it doesn't strip the links out.

This strips out the links, but doesn't show the formatting such as <p>:

$the_content = get_the_content();
$bad_tags = array('/<a title=\"(.*?)\" href=\"(.*?)\">/', '/<\/a>/');
$strip_tags = preg_replace($bad_tags, "", $the_content);
echo $strip_tags;

This DOESN'T strip out the links but does show the formatting:

$the_content = the_content();
$bad_tags = array('/<a title=\"(.*?)\" href=\"(.*?)\">/', '/<\/a>/');
$strip_tags = preg_replace($bad_tags, "", $the_content);
echo $strip_tags;

Answer 1

Use get_the_content(). You just need to use it cleverly. By default, get_the_content() returns the raw, non-formatted post_content field from the post object. In order to get formatted text, you need to run the result from get_the_content() though the the_content filters. This is exactly what the_content() does by default.

You can adjust your code to the following

$the_content = get_the_content();
$bad_tags    = ['/<a title=\"(.*?)\" href=\"(.*?)\">/', '/<\/a>/'];
$strip_tags  = preg_replace( $bad_tags, "" , $the_content );
echo apply_filters( 'the_content', $strip_tags );

EDIT

From comments, you should upgrade to at least PHP 5.6. Short array syntax only works from PHP 5.4, so that all means that you have a dinosaur version of PHP. This is a huge security risk to your site as all versions below PHP 5.5 is not supported anymore. Take note, PHP 5.5 will reach EOL in July, all updates, accept security updates, have been stopped already

PRE PHP 5.4 version

$the_content = get_the_content();
$bad_tags    = array( '/<a title=\"(.*?)\" href=\"(.*?)\">/', '/<\/a>/' );
$strip_tags  = preg_replace( $bad_tags, "" , $the_content );
echo apply_filters( 'the_content', $strip_tags );