Naughty Text 1.0 is a port of Andy Yaco-Mink's NaughtyWordChars for Movable Type version 3.3 (and above). The plugin catches and cleans characters pasted in from Microsoft Word documents and other sources that contain "special" characters that tend to break site validation schemes - especially RSS. Using Naughty Text you can automatically clean smart double quotes, apostrophes, en dashes, em dashes, and ellipses from titles, entries, excerpts, and comments.

Requirements: Movable Type version 3.31 (or above), Movable Type Enterprise version 1.02 (or above). NaughtyText is only known to operate on UTF-8 encoded data (which is the default for Movable Type blogs), use on other data encoding schemes is not supported.

Download:

Naughty Text 1.0 [zip / gz].

Thanks:

Thanks to Andy for a great plugin and AOG for help in debugging this version.

Documentation:

Naughty Text has three cleaning modes - entry, comment, and title.

For entries you can select which fields Naughty Text will operate on. The choices include; Title, Entry Extended, Entry, Keywords, Excerpt. After you select which fields to clean you need to pick a replacement encoding scheme:

Character entities (”, “, etc.) [*Default*]
ASCII equivalents (", ', ..., -, --)

If readability in the editing process is of chief concern to you, select "ASCII equivalents." HTML Character replacement will preserve the "look" of the pasted data, while making it semantically valid, but the resulting text may confuse authors unfamiliar with the HTML character codes.

Naughty Text can make its replacements on item save or item load. For maximum protection select both.

Naughty Text has two options for cleaning titles in the MT interface before the basename is constructed. The first option is to trim trailing and leading spaces and remove line-breaks from the title field. The second option is to clean title characters using ASCII equivalents. The use of both these options is recommended if you have authors pasting in entry titles and you find that yourself with RSS feeds that won't validate and/or strange entry basenames are being created. This is particularly an issue if you are not using MT 3.3x's built-in basename generation capabilities.

System vs. Blog Settings:

NaughtyText can be configured at the system level and at the blog level. For mutiblog sites NaughtyText can be configured at both the system and blog level, with the blog level settings taking precedence over the system settings. If NaughtyText is configured at the system level all of the blogs in the Movable Type installation (except those individually configured) will inherit the system level settings. To clear settings for an individual blog, chose the "Reset To Defaults" option.