There are two ways you can do it, one is using a regular expression the other is comparing strings.
First the regular expression approach:
if (preg_match("/([\<])([^\>]{1,})*([\>])/i", $string)) {
echo "string contains html";
}
And here is the other approach:
if(strlen($string) != strlen(strip_tags($string)){
echo "string contains HTML";
}
How to check whether a string contains HTML using PHP