How can HTML tags affect the output of the strlen() function in PHP?

HTML tags can affect the output of the strlen() function in PHP because the function counts the number of characters in a string, including HTML tags. If the string contains HTML tags, the function will count them as characters, which may lead to incorrect string length calculations. To solve this issue, you can use the strip_tags() function to remove HTML tags from the string before passing it to the strlen() function.

$string = "<p>Hello, world!</p>";
$clean_string = strip_tags($string);
$length = strlen($clean_string);

echo $length; // Output: 13