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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.