php - how to convert actionscript rich text to plain text?

I have a flex (flash builder 4) application with a rich text editor control. I am storing this rich text ou开发者_开发问答tput in a database via zend amf <--> php.

Now I want to display the first part of that text in a data grid. To do so it seems it might be easiest to get the plain text version.

I am hoping I can somehow convert it to plain text in PHP before I pass it back to flex?

Strip tags makes sense that it might work in php, but another option is to use the text property of the rich text field which retrieves the plain text version of the text. For example, in flex, load up the rich text from the db in to an in-memory rich text component, then get the plain text from that to display in the grid.