Paste as plain text, but keep spacing

Hello,

after googling for a couple hours, and searching through this forum and sourcecode, finally gave up, and decided to post here.
In one of my edit-forums, I want users only to paste as plain text, which works beautifully, but if it is from a source that has multiple spaces between words, it will loose the double spacing.
Even when I copy from 1 place in the document, to another line, it will take away my double spacings.
Any idea on how to prevent this, or point me to which script exactly deals with the converting to plain text?

Thanks

Mon, 08/09/2010 - 13:39

comp615

Joined: 02/07/2010

Posts: 295

Re: Paste as plain text, but keep spacing

I'm going to hazard a total guess and say that this problem comes from HTML's whitespace-reducing-features. Depending on how it interprets the original white space (as spaces or  ) , it might handle it differently. The only thing I can think of would be to write or find something which was able to pre-analyze white space and use  

Since a lot of the paste api is through the browsers, I bet that the browsers are simply condensing a lot of spaces...or alternatively, ignoring   as html code. What is the result you get with pasting as html? what is the source you are using?

Mon, 08/09/2010 - 13:59

flyboy

Joined: 09/08/2010

Posts: 4

Re: Paste as plain text, but keep spacing

original:
JAG LALIT (DH) 14/9/10 VIZAG

ends up as:
JAG LALIT (DH) 14/9/10 VIZAG

doesn't matter if the original has   or normal spaces in the source, always comes out wrong.

Mon, 08/09/2010 - 14:01

flyboy

Joined: 09/08/2010

Posts: 4

Re: Paste as plain text, but keep spacing

Flyboy wrote:original:
JAG LALIT (DH) 14/9/10 VIZAG

ends up as:
JAG LALIT (DH) 14/9/10 VIZAG

doesn't matter if the original has   or normal spaces in the source, always comes out wrong.

you might have to press quote on my message to see the spaces. They are taken out here as well...

Mon, 08/09/2010 - 14:13

comp615

Joined: 02/07/2010

Posts: 295

Re: Paste as plain text, but keep spacing

Hmm yeah I see...well you are fighting the basic instincts of HTML here, but it might be possible. take a look at the pastetext plugin. It's fairly small, but maybe you can find some way in there to prevent the spaces from being replaced. You might have to first convert the spaces to html entities...

Not the cleanest or easiest way, but probably the only one.

Wed, 08/11/2010 - 09:13

flyboy

Joined: 09/08/2010

Posts: 4

Re: Paste as plain text, but keep spacing

CKEDITOR.instances.message.on('paste', function(event) { event.data.html = event.data.text.replace(/ /g ,'&nbsp;');});

Wed, 08/11/2010 - 11:25

comp615

Joined: 02/07/2010

Posts: 295

Re: Paste as plain text, but keep spacing

That's exactly what I would have done. Hope it works out!