Okay I might not be going about this the right way, but here goes..
I have this string that takes a link and extracts the text between the tags...
$string = $item;
$pattern = '/\<a([^>]*)\>([^<]*)\<\/a\>/i';
$replacement = '$2';
$message = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $string);
There are a few items in this string that have ampersands (in the text portion, not the tag portion), however most don't. I'm trying to figure out a way to either incorporate the ampersand into the current pattern or do another preg_replace on the $message
to remove the ampersand after the tags are striped away.
THANKS!