Divs appearing everywhere in post content

Question

Whenever somebody writes a post on our site, the Paly Voice (http://palyvoice.com) there are automatically a lot of <div> elements created. This is bad for layout, since we have a style that applies to divs that we don't want to apply to story styles.

Is there a way to remove the automatic div insertion? If not, can I add a function hook to parse the post and remove them before saving to the DB?

Edit: Example here: http://palyvoice.com/2012/08/22/new-grade-reports-to-be-mailed-home-every-four-weeks-2/

Answer 1

You first should find out where the divs are coming from, since that's not normal behavior. Could be from a plugin or - as Damien said - copy-pasting a text from Word.

To remove the divs you can do a simple

str_replace(array('<div>', '</div>'), '', $content)

either before storing the text in the database (by hooking on save_post), or before displaying it on the site (by adding a filter on the_content).

EDIT: I was wrong, you don't hook on save_post, but instead you filter on wp_insert_post_data. This function below should work:

function remove_divs($data) {
    $filteredContent = str_replace(array('<div>', '</div>'), '', $data['post_content']);
    $data['post_content'] = $filteredContent;

    return $data;
}
add_filter('wp_insert_post_data', 'remove_divs', 99);

Put this in your functions.php

Answer 2

Is the person using cut n paste from word? This can add a lot of horrible extra elements.

In the toolbar for Wordpress there is a button for inserting directly from word .. This should help.