Clean Microsoft Word Pasted Text using JavaScript

Question

I am using a 'contenteditable' <div/> and enabling PASTE.

It is amazing the amount of markup code that gets pasted in from a clipboard copy from Microsoft Word. I am battling this, and have gotten about 1/2 way there using Prototypes' stripTags() function (which unfortunately does not seem to enable me to keep some tags).

However, even after that, I wind up with a mind-blowing amount of unneeded markup code.

So my question is, is there some function (using JavaScript), or approach I can use that will clean up the majority of this unneeded markup?

Answer 1

Here is the function I wound up writing that does the job fairly well (as far as I can tell anyway).

I am certainly open for improvement suggestions if anyone has any. Thanks.

function cleanWordPaste( in_word_text ) {
 var tmp = document.createElement("DIV");
 tmp.innerHTML = in_word_text;
 var newString = tmp.textContent||tmp.innerText;
 // this next piece converts line breaks into break tags
 // and removes the seemingly endless crap code
 newString  = newString.replace(/\n\n/g, "<br />").replace(/.*<!--.*-->/g,"");
 // this next piece removes any break tags (up to 10) at beginning
 for ( i=0; i<10; i++ ) {
  if ( newString.substr(0,6)=="<br />" ) { 
   newString = newString.replace("<br />", ""); 
  }
 }
 return newString;
}

Hope this is helpful to some of you.