Question

I know this issue has been touched on here but I have not found a viable solution for my situation yet, so I’d like to but the brain trust back to work and see what can be done.

I have a textarea in a form that needs to detect when something is pasted into it, and clean out any hidden HTML & quotation marks. The content of this form is getting emailed to a 3rd party system which is particularly bitchy, so sometimes even encoding it to the html entity characters isn’t going to be a safe bet.

I unfortunately cannot use something like FCKEditor, TinyMCE, etc, it’s gotta stay a regular textarea in this instance. I have attempted to dissect FCKEditor’s paste from word function but have not had luck tracking it down.

I am however able to use the jQuery library if need be, but haven’t found a jQuery plugin for this just yet.

I am specifically looking for information geared towards cleaning the information pasted in, not how to monitor the element for change of content.

Any constructive help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I am looking at David Archer’s answer and he pretty much answers it. I have used in the past a solution similar to his:

$("textarea").change( function() {
    // convert any opening and closing braces to their HTML encoded equivalent.
    var strClean = $(this).val().replace(/</gi, '&lt;').replace(/>/gi, '&gt;');

    // Remove any double and single quotation marks.
    strClean = strClean.replace(/"/gi, '').replace(/'/gi, '');

    // put the data back in.
    $(this).val(strClean);
});

If you are looking for a way to completely REMOVE HTML tags

$("textarea").change( function() {
    // Completely strips tags.  Taken from Prototype library.
    var strClean = $(this).val().replace(/<\/?[^>]+>/gi, '');

    // Remove any double and single quotation marks.
    strClean = strClean.replace(/"/gi, '').replace(/'/gi, '');

    // put the data back in.
    $(this).val(strClean);
});