Here’s a small PHP function that gets rid of the mIRC (or any other IRC client) control characters, that is the colors, underlines, italics, etc.
function stripControlCharacters($text) { $controlCodes = array( '/(\x03(?:\d{1,2}(?:,\d{1,2})?)?)/', // Color code '/\x02/', // Bold '/\x0F/', // Escaped '/\x16/', // Italic '/\x1F/' // Underline ); return preg_replace($controlCodes,'',$text); }