{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "description": "Regular Expression to automatically parse Microsoft Word's footnote format into a more web-friendly format for WordPress's Simple Footnotes plugin",
  "path": "/2011/03/20/regular-expression-to-parse-word-style-footnotes/",
  "publishedAt": "2011-03-20T04:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:dw6j5wx7vyzjxxoauzdbim6w/site.standard.publication/3mn5pbyuiq52t",
  "textContent": "I needed a quick-and-easy way to parse Microsoft Word's footnote format into a more web-friendly format for a recent project. After a bit of regular expression hacking, I was able to build a WordPress plugin to automatically convert content pasted from Word into a format readable by Andrew Nacin's popular Simple Footnotes plugin. The process is surprisingly simple given WordPress's extensive filter API. First, to grab the footnotes from Word's format: This creates an array ( ) with the both the footnote number and the text of the footnote. We then need a way to replace the in-text reference with the parsed footnotes so that Simple Footnotes can understand them. I did this by creating two arrays, a find array and a replace array with each Word-style footnote reference and its Simple Footnote formatted counterpart: Finally, so that the entire replacement can be done in a single pass, push a final find/replace pair into the end of the array, to remove the original footnotes: Because PHP's function can handle arrays, all we have to do is run a single function: You can find the full plugin code in the GitHub repository. To use, you can download the plugin file[^1] and activate (be sure you already have Simple Footnotes installed). Copy the content from Word, and Paste into the \"Paste from Word\" box (may need to toggle the \"Kitchen Sink\".[^2] Thoughts? Improvements? The above code solved a rather stubborn workflow problem in a project I was working on, and hopefully it can do the same for you. Feel free to use/improve the above code. [^1]: Licensed under GPLv2 [^2]: You can even Fork the plugin over on GitHub",
  "title": "Regular Expression to Parse Word-style Footnotes into WordPress's Simple Footnotes Format"
}