How to strip html encoded stuffs?

I have the following string:

$sOriginal = "<a href=\"asdf.com\">Hello there</a><strong>ABC</strong>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color=red>XYZ</font>";

$sStripped = strip_tags($sOriginal);

echo $sStripped;

..........................and I will get this:

helloABC XYZ

....which is correct. BUT, how do I tell it to ignore the &nbsp and all those HTML encoded stuffs. btw, doing this for searching. I don't want users to search for the string "nbsp" and the line above appearing, which is wrong.

Is there a function to strip all those html encoded stuffs?

preg_split() would be a better option if you are extracting data within html tags...