Remove formatting from a contentEditable div

Question

I have a contentEditable Div and I want remove any formatting especially for copy and paste text.

Answer 1

You can't access the system clipboard so you'll need a hack. See this question: JavaScript get clipboard data on paste event (Cross browser)

Answer 2

<p spellcheck="false" contentEditable onkeydown="return false">text</p>

Answer 3

document.querySelector('div[contenteditable="true"]').addEventListener("paste", function(e) {
        e.preventDefault();
        var text = e.clipboardData.getData("text/plain");
        document.execCommand("insertHTML", false, text);
    });

It is simple: add a listener to the "paste" event and reeformat clipboard contents.

Here another example for all containers in the body:

[].forEach.call(document.querySelectorAll('div[contenteditable="true"]'), function (el) {
    el.addEventListener('paste', function(e) {
        e.preventDefault();
        var text = e.clipboardData.getData("text/plain");
        document.execCommand("insertHTML", false, text);
    }, false);
});

Saludos.

Answer 4

With Jquery you can use .text() method, so, when blur for example you can replace the content with the text content

$("#element").blur(function(e) {
    $(this).html($(this).text());
});

Answer 5

I'd like to add my solution to this issue:

ContentEditableElement.addEventListener('input', function(ev) {
  if(ev.target.innerHTML != ev.target.textContent) {

    // determine position of the text caret
    var caretPos = 0,
      sel, range;
    sel = window.getSelection();
    if (sel.rangeCount) {
      range = sel.getRangeAt(0);
      var children = ev.target.childNodes;
      var keepLooping = true;
      for(let i = 0; keepLooping; i++) {
        if(children[i] == range.commonAncestorContainer || children[i] == range.commonAncestorContainer.parentNode) {
          caretPos += range.endOffset;
          keepLooping = false;
        } else {
          caretPos += children[i].textContent.length;
        }
      }

      // set the element's innerHTML to its textContent
      ev.target.innerHTML = ev.target.textContent;

      // put the caret where it was before
      range = document.createRange();
      range.setStart(ev.target.childNodes[0], caretPos);
      range.collapse(true);
      sel.removeAllRanges();
      sel.addRange(range);
    }
  }
});

(this isn't compatible with older versions of IE)

Answer 6

I know it's been a while, but I had the same problem. On my case, it's a GWT application to make it even worse. Anyway, resolved the problem with:

var clearText = event.clipboardData.getData('text/plain');
document.execCommand('inserttext', false, clearText);

See: https://jsfiddle.net/erikwoods/Ee3yC/

I preffered "inserttext" command instead of "insertHTML", because the documentation says it's exactly to insert plain text, so seems more suitable. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/execCommand