TinyMCE Paste As Plain Text

There is now a new option that replaces all of the above:

tinymce.init({
   paste_as_text: true
});

See http://www.tinymce.com/wiki.php/Configuration:paste_as_text

or in django-tinymce, in the settings.py:

TINYMCE_DEFAULT_CONFIG = {
   'paste_as_text': True,
}

This is what i do to get paste plain text.

1. paste_preprocess setting (in tinymce init)

paste_preprocess : function(pl, o) {
  //example: keep bold,italic,underline and paragraphs
  //o.content = strip_tags( o.content,'<b><u><i><p>' );

  // remove all tags => plain text
  o.content = strip_tags( o.content,'' );
},

2. function strip_tags (on the main document)

// Strips HTML and PHP tags from a string 
// returns 1: 'Kevin <b>van</b> <i>Zonneveld</i>'
// example 2: strip_tags('<p>Kevin <img src="someimage.png" onmouseover="someFunction()">van <i>Zonneveld</i></p>', '<p>');
// returns 2: '<p>Kevin van Zonneveld</p>'
// example 3: strip_tags("<a href='http://kevin.vanzonneveld.net'>Kevin van Zonneveld</a>", "<a>");
// returns 3: '<a href='http://kevin.vanzonneveld.net'>Kevin van Zonneveld</a>'
// example 4: strip_tags('1 < 5 5 > 1');
// returns 4: '1 < 5 5 > 1'
function strip_tags (str, allowed_tags)
{

    var key = '', allowed = false;
    var matches = [];    var allowed_array = [];
    var allowed_tag = '';
    var i = 0;
    var k = '';
    var html = ''; 
    var replacer = function (search, replace, str) {
        return str.split(search).join(replace);
    };
    // Build allowes tags associative array
    if (allowed_tags) {
        allowed_array = allowed_tags.match(/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/gi);
    }
    str += '';

    // Match tags
    matches = str.match(/(<\/?[\S][^>]*>)/gi);
    // Go through all HTML tags
    for (key in matches) {
        if (isNaN(key)) {
                // IE7 Hack
            continue;
        }

        // Save HTML tag
        html = matches[key].toString();
        // Is tag not in allowed list? Remove from str!
        allowed = false;

        // Go through all allowed tags
        for (k in allowed_array) {            // Init
            allowed_tag = allowed_array[k];
            i = -1;

            if (i != 0) { i = html.toLowerCase().indexOf('<'+allowed_tag+'>');}
            if (i != 0) { i = html.toLowerCase().indexOf('<'+allowed_tag+' ');}
            if (i != 0) { i = html.toLowerCase().indexOf('</'+allowed_tag)   ;}

            // Determine
            if (i == 0) {                allowed = true;
                break;
            }
        }
        if (!allowed) {
            str = replacer(html, "", str); // Custom replace. No regexing
        }
    }
    return str;
}

Actually, you can now just do this:

plugins: 'paste',
...
paste_auto_cleanup_on_paste : true,
paste_remove_styles: true,
paste_remove_styles_if_webkit: true,
paste_strip_class_attributes: true,

Credit goes to: http://www.miuaiga.com/index.cfm/2010/1/7/New-TinyMCE-lets-you-paste-as-plain-text-automatically