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);
}