Recently I noticed that when I paste (some) text into the composer span tags are included. For example Then the brahmin Jānussoṇi went up to the Buddha, and exchanged greetings with him. When the greetings and polite conversation were over, he sat down to one side and said to the Buddha: I can only reproduce this when the spans include the lang parameter. And strangely, if I type three back ticks in the composer to start a code block and paste the text on the next line, the span tags are not pasted. So Then the brahmin Jānussoṇi went up to the Buddha, and exchanged greetings with him. When the greetings and polite conversation were over, he sat down to one side and said to the Buddha: That’s really, really strange. Was there some change to the way html gets processed? I know (and appreciate) that some limited html gets converted into Markdown. However those spans should not be pasted. (If anything, pasting into a code block should include the spans and pasting into a regular paragraph should not. But honestly I don’t think they should be pasted anywhere)

Where did you copy the text from? @renato has been doing some fixes in this area recently, not sure if there’s been any regressions though.

Here is an example page. I have tried pasting similar text that has spans without the lang params and they paste as normal, i.e. no html span tags. That’s why I’m thinking it has to do with the lang I should also note we are on v2026.7.0-latest.

I merged an improvement yesterday to avoid these span HTML elements when they come from Word, but I’ll take another look with your example. Please let us know if you find any other example. Just note than a span element with the lang attribute is a valid combination as an inline html markdown-it token, the system is keeping them for consistency because it’s “valid”, my concern is “fixing it too much” and stripping instances with additional attributes that were intentional (maybe not even an issue, I’ll investigate). [image] one1: (If anything, pasting into a code block should include the spans and pasting into a regular paragraph should not. But honestly I don’t think they should be pasted anywhere) This is not the case because the clipboard contains both HTML and text/plain in this scenario, and the system uses the appropriate origin if you paste outside vs inside a code block.

Someone suggested I share a screenshot of what I mean: [image] In the rendered (?) version it looks fine except for the fact that the space is missing between the spans. EDIT: But we don’t want them in the composer at all. They make things really messy and hard to read.

[image] renato: my concern is “fixing it too much” and stripping instances with additional attributes that were intentional I’m curious where you are at with this. I’m 100% sure this started happening recently on our forum. We haven’t done an upgrade in about three weeks. Are you planning on not keeping the spans with the lang params? Or do we need to find a way to fix this on our own. I’d really just like for it to go back to the way it was prior to about a month ago. We’ve been pasting from our website to our forum for 10 years and this only started happening very recently.

It does seem like the missing whitespace is a real issue that should be fixed; once that’s taken care of the extra lang tags only look weird in the editor without actually hurting the final post.

[image] riking: the extra lang tags only look weird in the editor without actually hurting the final post While technically true, for our users (who are almost all non-coders) having all of those spans pasted in is indeed problematic. Because our source material puts these spans around every phrase, there could be a dozen span sets in a single paragraph of text. We just are asking for this to be treated the same way it was prior to the recent change (i.e. not paste html simply because there are lang params in the elements)

I think Renato is working on a fix FIX: Strip `lang` from pasted spans (#42163) main ← strip-pasted-lang-spans Zusammengeführt am 05:03PM - 04 Aug 26 UTC (UTC) [image] renato +64 -65 Text copied from a web page arrived in the composer wrapped in literal ` ` markup, and with the spaces between sentences missing. Publishing tools stamp `lang` on the spans they wrap each sentence in, and the DOM parse rule accepted it. The whitespace went with it: a space sitting at the edge of a span is normalised away when the span survives as a node, so the sentences ran together in the post, not only in the composer. Spans are no longer parsed from DOM, so both go away. A `lang` written in markdown arrives as a token instead, so it still round-trips, including while the span is edited. This also covers the Word-specific strip that handled the same problem for a single source. An authored `lang` now survives only as markdown, and is dropped whenever a span reaches the composer as HTML, including quoting a post. Reported in [Has something changed with pasting HTML into the composer?](https://meta.discourse.org/t/has-something-changed-with-pasting-html-into-the-composer/407661)

Recently upgrade and the fix worked. Thank you!!!

Has something changed with pasting html into the composer?

Product Support

renato (Renato Atilio) August 6, 2026, 6:04pm 11

This has been merged. Let us know if there’s anything still missing.

Thank you!

Topic		Replies	Views
Custom processing of html in composer paste? Product Support	2	95	July 15, 2026
`white-space` CSS property of clipboard data not respected when pasting in rich text editor Bug composer	12	689	January 16, 2026
Problem pasting HTML into Markdown composer on mobile (until pasting once into rich text editor) Bug composer , mobile , markdown	8	342	November 12, 2026
Coincidental Markdown in formatted content pasted to rich text editor rendered on publish Bug composer	0	178	October 27, 2025
Please bring back in new composer: insert link from clipboard on selected text Product Support composer	3	226	July 18, 2025

Has something changed with pasting html into the composer?

Related topics