Many thanx for your reply.

Well, the snippet you posted is more or less what I need. However, I dont know perl and it looks more serverside than clientside. My need:

I need to clean all html-tags from a string with some exception-tags. I can only define the exceptions, not the tags to clean. This must be accomplished clientside, preferably javascript, possibly javascript dom even thou then ill be well out of my depth.

Background (read it or not, its verbose): entering windows vista the active-x wysiwyg html editor on a content management system im hosting stopped working. My job was to integrate the fck instead of the activex.

The old component never removed copy-pasted tags from word etc, it just "hugged the text" with its own fonttags, thus hiding loads of garbage thats still in the db. fck cannot support these css fonttags in sufficiently userfriendly manner so, in the future im using h1,h2,h3 and such together with css. However, when a user wishes to edit stuff that was produced with the old editor i fret that there might be inconsistences between h1 (fck) and font class=r1(old wysiwyg).

And, further, if I exchange normal text markup in old editor(font class="f1") with that of fck(nothing) all the junk that has been copy-pasted into the cms system and then been hidden by hug-the-text-fonttags will suddenly surface. Thus, i want to nuke everything, on usercommand, except for stuff like links, linebreaks, tables, images paragraphtags etcetera.