PHP to clean-up pasted Microsoft input

Question

I have a site where users can post stuff (as in forums, comments, etc) using a customised implementation of TinyMCE. A lot of them like to copy & paste from Word, which means their input often comes with a plethora of associated MS inline formatting.

I can't just get rid of <span whatever> as TinyMCE relies on the span tag for some of it's formatting, and I can't (and don't want to) force said users to use TinyMCE's "Paste From Word" feature (which doesn't seem to work that well anyway).

Anyone know of a library/class/function that would take care of this for me? It must be a common problem, though I can't find anything definitive. I've been thinking recently that a series of brute-force regexes looking for MS-specific patterns might do the trick, but I don't want to re-write something that may already be available unless I must.

Also, fixing of curly quotes, em-dashes, etc would be good. I have my own stuff to do this now, but I'd really just like to find one MS-conversion filter to rule them all.

Eran Galperin · Accepted Answer · 2008-12-18T23:01:49.070

7

HTML Purifier will create standards compliant markup and filter out many possible attacks (such as XSS).

For faster cleanups that don't require XSS filtering, I use the PECL extension Tidy which is a binding for the Tidy HTML utility.

If those don't help you, I suggest you switch to FCKEditor which has this feature built-in.

edited Dec 18 '08 at 23:01

answered Dec 18 '08 at 21:39

Eran Galperin

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Thanks, but neither of those appear to cope with MS formatting, which is what I'm primarily interested in. HTML Purifier has it planned for version 3.5 but with "research necessary". – da5id Dec 18 '08 at 21:48
Then I suggest you switch to fckeditor which can deal with word input. Updated my answer. – Eran Galperin Dec 18 '08 at 23:02
Hmm. I previously preferred TinyMCE over FCKeditor for a number of other reasons, but this may sway me. Thanks for the tip & pleased to be accepting my +1 :) – da5id Dec 18 '08 at 23:19
Mind you, (if I switch) I still need to clean all the crap that's *already* been posted... – da5id Dec 18 '08 at 23:21
Try the non PHP suggestions in the following link - http://forums.devarticles.com/general-programming-help-4/removing-ms-word-html-from-a-file-4068.html – Eran Galperin Dec 19 '08 at 01:59
2

Also note that FCKEditor is no longer supported and will have problems with modern browsers, so you should use CKEditor instead. http://ckeditor.com/ – Kaivosukeltaja Mar 20 '12 at 11:50
Just a note, Tidy does indeed cope with MS formatting, and has for years. I was using 4-5 years ago to strip pasted MS Word content... http://tidy.sourceforge.net/docs/quickref.html#word-2000 – Jon L. Apr 13 '12 at 14:56

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 05 '17 at 19:51

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In my case, this worked just fine:

$text = strip_tags($text, '<p><a><em><span>');

Rather than trying to pull out stuff you don't want such as embedded word xml, you can just specify you're allowed tags.

answered Jul 05 '17 at 19:51

oknate

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 12 '15 at 10:25

The website http://word2cleanhtml.com/ does a good job on converting from Word. I'm using it in PHP by scrapping, to process some legacy HTML, and until now it's working pretty fine (the result is very clean <p>, <b> code). Of course, being an external service it's not good to use it in online processing like your case.

If you try it and it brings many 400 errors, try filtering the HTML with Tidy first.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered May 17 '16 at 19:14

In my case, there was a pattern. The unwanted part always started with

<!-- [if gte mso 9]>

and ended by an

<![endif]-->

So my solution was to cut out everything before and after this block:

$array = explode("<!-", $string, 2);
$begin = $array[0];
$end=substr(strrchr($string,'[endif]-->'),10);
echo $begin.$end;

PHP to clean-up pasted Microsoft input

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