There has got to be a better way to do this (Input Handling/Tag stripping)

[eluser]plainas[/eluser]
I would use htmlspecialchars() instead. If you use UTF-8 there's no need for htmlentities() as all those entities are already avialable in Unicode's UTF-8.

If you run a string through htmlspecialchars() you can safely display it. All < > and / will be parsed into their entity so you're sure no html is parsed by the browser.

But it sounds to me that you're looking for something like this instead:
http://se2.php.net/strip-tags

Also, since you're passing a lot of functions through the same function the array_map() function might come in
http://se2.php.net/array_map

remember you can pipe any php function that accepts one argument throug your validation class.
Check the manual where it shows how to prep data:
http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-gui...ation.html