CakePHP remove HTML from plain text email - php

Question

I'm using the email componant in my cakephp app (2.2) to send emails to subscribed people when a new article is added in my app.
I use TinyMCE to allow admin users to format text which results in some formatting HTML being saved in the database (which is fine) however I want to email the opted in users the whole article in email format, both html and plain text when a new article is added. This works fine for the html version but how can I strip the html from the plain text version whilst keeping it in the html version? Heres my code so far:
public function admin_add() {
if ($this->request->is('post')) {
$this->NewsArticle->create();
if ($this->NewsArticle->save($this->request->data)) {
// If is a tech alart - send email
if ($this->request->data['NewsCategory']['NewsCategory']['0'] == '2') {
// Email users who have opted in to webform updates
$usersToEmail = $this->NewsArticle->query("SELECT username, tech_email FROM users WHERE tech_email = 1");
// Loop throughh all opt'ed in users
foreach ($usersToEmail as $user) {
$this->Email->template = 'newTechAlert';
$this->Email->from = 'Client Area <clientarea#someurl.co.uk>';
$this->Email->to = $user['users']['username'];
$this->Email->subject = 'New Technical Alert';
// Send as both HTML and Text
$this->Email->sendAs = 'both';
// Set vars for email
$this->set('techAlertTitle', $this->request->data['NewsArticle']['title']);
## NEED TO STRIP THE HTML OUT FOR NONE HTML EMAILS HERE - BUT HOW???
$this->set('techAlertBody', $this->request->data['NewsArticle']['body']);
$this->set('user', $user['users']['username']);
$this->Email->send();
}
}

Answer 1

I use:
$this->Email->emailFormat('both');
// Convert <br> to \n
$text = preg_replace('/<br(\s+)?\/?>/i', "\n", $html);
// Remove html markup
$text = trim(strip_tags($text));
// Replace multiple (one ore more) line breaks with a single one.
$text = preg_replace("/(\r\n|\r|\n)+/", "\n", $text);
$this->Email->viewVars(compact('text', 'html'));
note that if you foreach, you should reset the email class after each run to avoid issues:
$this->Email->reset();

Answer 2

You can use the php strip_tags method
http://php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php
//HTML VERSION
$this->set('techAlertHtmlBody', $this->request->data['NewsArticle']['body']);
//PLAIN TEXT VERSION
$this->set('techAlertPlainBody', strip_tags($this->request->data['NewsArticle']['body']));
You can also pass a second param to the function to still allow line breaks or href tags.