Repeat after me... "tinyMCE is not an HTML editor"

A "Remove MS-Word Formating in tinyMCE" Callback

Ok first let me explain that this is a quick hack. I use tinyMCE to allow my customers to edit most of the content on their websites. One of the things I hate about tinyMCE is that it was created to mimic MicroSoft Word, not to be a HTML editor. With that being said, I hate that tinyMCE is trying to mimic MS-Word. I want to give my clients the ability to edit the content on their site, and I would like that content to be simple HTML, not complicated MS-Word syntax. And one of the things my clients love to do is paste content into the tinyMCE editor window from MS-Word.

Well this little hack does it's best to remove/re-style what they paste in. Just add this function in your javascript (ideally above the tinyMCE.init() declaration:

function cleanUpFormating(inst) {

var content = inst.getBody().innerHTML;

// WORD CLEANUP
content = content.replace(new RegExp('<p.*?class[\s]*=[\s]*["|\']?MsoHeading["|\']?.*?[^>]*>(.*?)<\/p>','gim'),'<p><strong>$1<\/strong><\/p>');
content = content.replace(new RegExp('<p[^>]*>','gim'),'<p>');
content = content.replace(new RegExp('<strong[^>]*>','gim'),'<strong>');
content = content.replace(new RegExp('<em[^>]*>','gim'),'<em>');
content = content.replace(new RegExp('<span[^>]*>','gim'),'');
content = content.replace(new RegExp('<\/span>','gim'),'');
content = content.replace(new RegExp('<font[^>]*>','gim'),'');
content = content.replace(new RegExp('<\/font>','gim'),'');

// REMOVE TAGS
content = content.replace(new RegExp('<img[^>]*>','gim'),'');
content = content.replace(new RegExp('<div[^>]*>(.*?)<\/div>','gim'),'<p>$1<\/p>');

// REMOVE EMPTY TAGS
for (i=0;i<5;i++) {
content = content.replace(new RegExp('<(\w+)[^>]*>\s*?</$1>','gim'),'');
}

// REPLACE NON-ASCII
content = content.replace(new RegExp('[^\0-\x80]','gim'),'');

inst.getBody().innerHTML = content;
}

... and then add this line to your tinyMCE.init() setup values:

onchange_callback : "cleanUpFormating"

Now, everytime the user makes a change, it will clean up the code in the editor window. Shout out below, if you see any problems or see an improvement you can add to it.

P.S. I should be back to my regularly schedule blog postings after I finish some projects.