Function to remove smart quotes, HTML and other special characters from text. Call the function with text as argument, function returns clean text.
As of April 2026, Cleanup Text is a WordPress html plugin with 10 active installations and a 0/5 rating0. It has been downloaded 2.6K+ times in total. Requires WordPress 1.0.0+ and PHP false+. Available on WordPress.org since 2010. Last updated 15 years ago — may have compatibility concerns. Top alternative: Shortcoder — Create Shortcodes for….
WordPress posts and pages can contain Smart quotes and other fancy characters. But Smartquotes and other special characters don’t work properly if you send the contents of a post by email. This plugin cleans up text so it can be emailed properly.
Instead of using this plugin you could use WordPress filters to reformat text, but WordPress filters cannot be used with PHP functions like strip_tags. If you use a filter to remove Smart quotes you can’t also use strip_tags to remove HTML.
Also, WordPress filters don’t remove all the characters that could cause problems. For example, double spaces are not removed properly by WordPress, and Europeans will have problems with the UK pound currency symbol.
This very simple plugin removes all sorts of special characters, including d…
| WordPress | 1.0.0+ requiredTested up to 3.0.0 |
| PHP | false+ required |
For changelog please visit http://www.thehypervisor.com/cleanup-text/
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