Is there a way to insert html tags into post content using wp_insert_post()?

Hi,

I am programmatically creating posts and for the content of a post I would like to have some text and a link using the HTML <a> tag.

However, as per

https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/wp_insert_post/

wp_insert_post() passes data through sanitize_post(), which itself handles all necessary sanitization and validation (kses, etc.).

Eg if I set:

$post_content = $item_description.'<br><br><br>'.$item_url;

And then do:

// Create post object
$my_post = array(
‘post_title’ => wp_strip_all_tags( $item_title ),
‘post_content’ => $post_content,
‘post_status’ => ‘publish’,
‘post_author’ => 1
);

// Insert the post into the database
wp_insert_post( $my_post );

Then the <br>tags are stripped out in the actual post content.

I also tried <p>which is stripped out as well and so I would think <a> would be stripped out as well.

Is there a way to insert html especially <br>and <a> tags into post content?

Thanks ahead of time for any help.

EDIT – I found a bit later that when I added anchor tags, these tags were not stripped out.

Resolved.