Stripping MS Word code from my forms once and for all.

Hi,

I have a form that allows users to comment, add entries and so on.
But what a lot of them do is copy and paste directly from MS Word to my
forms.

almost all browsers will accept the post and give the impression that
everything is saved properly.

But, that is not the case when it comes time to displaying the message
in my page.

So how can I strip/replace all the MS Word invalid code from my
$_POSTs?

Thanks

FFMG


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re: Stripping MS Word code from my forms once and for all.

I found this on php.net at http://uk2.php.net/strtr which may be of
some help:




After battling with strtr trying to strip out MS word formatting from
things pasted into forms I ended up coming up with this..

it strips ALL non-standard ascii characters, preserving html codes and
such, but gets rid of all the characters that refuse to show in
firefox.

If you look at this page in firefox you will see a ton of "question
mark" characters and so it is not possible to copy and paste those to
remove them from strings.. (this fixes that issue nicely, though I
admit it could be done a bit better)

<?
function fixoutput($str){
$good[] = 9; #tab
$good[] = 10; #nl
$good[] = 13; #cr
for($a=32;$a<127;$a++){
$good[] = $a;
}
$len = strlen($str);
for($b=0;$b < $len+1; $b++){
if(in_array(ord($str[$b]), $good)){
$newstr .= $str[$b];
}//fi
}//rof
return $newstr;
}
?>

re: Stripping MS Word code from my forms once and for all.

Sanders Kaufman;92056 Wrote:No, sorry I was actually talking about some non standard characters
that MS Words inserts.

Some bowser will, (maybe wrongly), not display any invalid characters
in the textarea itself giving the user the impression that everything
is fine.

But when I then try to display the comment/entry I get a bunch of
questions marks for the characters that were invalid.

FFMG


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re: Stripping MS Word code from my forms once and for all.

FFMG wrote:Ah, so. You're having a character set problem.
Rather than have a big old off-topic thread about it here, you should
probably take the question to an Office or HTML group.
PHP won't help you much.

re: Stripping MS Word code from my forms once and for all.

Sanders Kaufman;92237 Wrote:No I am not, read the question again, carefully this time.
Textareas of most browsers will, (wrongly), accept MS Word pasted
code.

By the time it gets to my server I have to clean it up.
My PHP code must handle it.

Is that on topic enough for you?

FFMG


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re: Stripping MS Word code from my forms once and for all.

FFMG wrote:Yes, this has been asked before - but I don't remember what the answer was.

The easiest way would be to check for non-alphanumeric chars using a
regex. If you find any, tell the user to use plain text editor.

You could use a regex to strip non-alphanumeric characters, but this
might have some problems. For instance, what happens if you have a
control sequence which happens to contain a character - i.e. 0x010231?
The 0x42 would be taken as the character '1', even though it's part of a
control sequence. But you could clean it up fairly well this way.

Try googling this newsgroup for something like "MS WORD". It's been a
few months.

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re: Stripping MS Word code from my forms once and for all.

FFMG wrote:How's that workin' out for ya, champ?
Have you noticed the roar of silence in response to your original request?

Seriously - you'll get a better response in an HTML or MS Office group.

There are no such things as "MS characters" or an MS Office Character Set.

re: Stripping MS Word code from my forms once and for all.

Sanders Kaufman;92428 Wrote:Read the thread, the answer was given.

I see you could not answer the question so you have to start using
abusive language.

Shame.

FFMG


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