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

Answer 1

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.

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.

Answer 3

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;

Answer 4

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.