How to clear all Non-Visible characters when there is no visible content

[j]

Hey folks,

This should be an easy one, but unfortunately not finding an easy way around it.

 

Problem Statement: When there are no visible characters in the input area, strip out all non-visible characters.

Details:

            Our users can copy past from word files and or other sources, then they can decide to remove it.But this creates HTML equivalents of non-visible characters like 1) Tab, 2) whitespaces, 3)Carriage Returns or any other possible non-visible characters. My requirement is simple, if there are no visible characters, the input area should be reset to nothing or null.But in my case HTML equivalents of the above mentioned visible chars are saved which is not ideal.

I tied some JS to strip those using regular expressions, but not quite working, tried server side one too(c#) but it is messing up the visible content too. Is there a property I can set to make this working ?

 

Thanks for  your help!

[Marcel]

I have the same problem since updating to the new version

&  is always present in the text returned to the server

any solutions ???

[Marin Bratanov]

Hello,

The most likely reason for such behavior is that the user does not select all the content (e..g, when using the mouse) and thus some content is left over.

I am attaching a short video with the expected behavior of using ctrl+a and then del or backspace.

@Marcel - it is possible that a proxy or some browser extension is adding that the POST. In any case, if you get this consistently instead of an empty string, you can add a check to see if this is all you get and if so - consider it empty.

@j - this is actually not easy at all, because non-breaking spaces can get created by the user (e..g, when holding the space button). They will not be seen by the user, but they are still part of the content and so the editor must not remove them on its own, because they will often be required as part of the content. Nevertheless, you  can use the .Text server property or get_text() methods to get the text equivalent of the content. So, if trimming it (e..g, the JS .trim() or C#'s Trim() methods on that string return an empty string - you'll know it's all whitespace.

Regards,
Marin Bratanov
Progress Telerik