TinyMCE stops adding paragraph tags to text if you paste text with div tags before starting to write

[diegoe]

In the Post Editor (Visual mode) if you paste innocently looking text (from a website) that contains <div> elements inside, you'll have the auto addition of <p> elements to your text broken.

New lines will be inside <div> elements instead of <p> elements.

To break the editor:

1. Select and copy text that is spaced (or just surrounded) with <div> elements.
2. Paste that text into the Post Editor (Visual).
3. Hit Enter and try to go on with your post.

Result:
The text you add, no matter how much you hit enter, will be all surrounded with <div>, not with <p>

Expected Result:
The text you add behaves as usual and has no tag added, but, of course, has automatic <p> tags when shown in your site.

I can reproduce with trunk. Note that the <div> elements I'm using to test have no style or anything.

See attached HTML test case, you can use the scholarly lyrics in it as a test.

I'm adding some screenshots too.

[diegoe]

Visual Editor: Text looks pretty innocent.

[diegoe]

Text Editor: The actual content is pretty broken. Spacing between lines will fail.

[diegoe]

HTML Test for <div> elements

[tellyworth]

I was able to reproduce this in both 3.9.2 and trunk.

To clarify the steps, here's what I did:

1. Switch the editor to Text, paste the HTML.
2. Switch to Visual.
3. Move the cursor to the end.
4. Type a few lines of text.
5. Switch back to Text mode - the lines I added in step 4 are wrapped in divs.

[iseulde]

Related: #31219.

[programmin]

Yes, divs should work a lot better than they do in Wordpress currently - see for example #31263
Hope this can be fixed, as even GMail doesn't use paragraph tags, and it's quite common to find divs rather than p tags on sites.

[programmin]

This is still super annoying even in 4.8.2. Divs should be much better supported in Wordpress since any shortcodes that outputs a div tag within a line of text will go out of the p tag and not get any styling or coloring of <span tag that should be around it, as it is invalid html if you use p instead of div containers.

[azaozz]

This is (looks like) an architectural decision in TinyMCE. It can only be fixed/changed upstream. In that terms it is "working as expected" in WP. Furthermore it is now superseded by the block editor. The blocks use either <p> or <div> as appropriate.