How to prevent ckeditor to not add   in blank html tag

Have a look at this Post: CKEditor unwanted   characters

After some research I might shed some light on this issue - unfortunately there is no out-of-the-box solution.

In the CKEditor there are four ways a no-break space can occur (anybody knows more?):

1. Automatic filling of empty blocks. This can be disabled in the config:

   config.fillEmptyBlocks = false;
   

2. Automatic insertion when pressing TAB-key. This can be diabled in the config:

   config.tabSpaces = 0;
   

3. Converting double spaces to SPACE+NBSP. This is a browser behavior and will thus not be fixed by the CKEditor team. It could be fixed serverside or by a clientside javascript onunload. Maybe this php is a start:

   preg_replace('/\s \s/i', ' ', $text);
   

4. By copy&paste. If you paste a UTF-8 no-break space or double-spaces CKEditor will convert it automatically. The only solution I see here is doing a regex as above. config.forcePasteAsPlainText = true; doesn't help.

Summary: To get rid of all no-break spaces you need to write an additional function that cleans user input.

Comments and further suggestions are greatly appreciated! (I'm using ckeditor 3.6.4)

EDIT #1

Have a look at this.

CKEDITOR.dtd.$removeEmpty.i= 0;

You can also can use this with span and other tags.

The documentation to this.

Stop Removing ANY Empty Tag in CKEditor

There is a defined list of tags that is going to be removed if empty(see dtd.js and $removeEmpty or run CKEDITOR.dtd.$removeEmpty from console).

• From HTmL

To ensure the certain empty tag are not being removed, add attribute ‘data-cke-survive’:

<span data-cke-survive="true" ></span>

• From Configurations

Or you can configure the particular tag from not be removed:

if(window.CKEDITOR){
            CKEDITOR.on('instanceCreated', function (ev) {
                CKEDITOR.dtd.$removeEmpty['span'] = 0;
                CKEDITOR.dtd.$removeEmpty['TAG-NAME'] = 0;
           }
}

By setting an element to 0 in the CKEDITOR.dtd.$removeEmpty, it prevents the empty tags from being removed by CKEditor.

http://margotskapacs.com/