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;

Thanks in advance for any help.