Filter selection on cut/copy with javascript?

On one of my sites, I used ­ liberally to provide better hyphenation in the web browser. Unfortunately, they get corrupted by copying or cutting and pasting, so when people copy from my website, the ar-tic-les ap-pear with ex-tra hy-phens which are really annoying. I exaggerated it a bit here, but you get the idea.

I'd love a way to filter the selection on copy - basically an opportunity to remove the ­'s before they get to the clipboard. I suspect this isn't possible, based on what I've read/researched, but thought I'd ask the collective wisdom here, in case I've missed something.

A p开发者_运维知识库seudocode example of what would be beautiful:

element.oncopy = function (ev) {
    ev.selection.replace(/­/g, '');
    return true; // or ev, I suppose
}

Have a look at this article about the oncopy event. I think it is exactly what you need: http://help.dottoro.com/ljwexqxl.php.

Example #2 on the following page explains how to use the clipboard in a cross-browser friendly way (since only IE has access to the clipboardData object used in the first article): http://help.dottoro.com/ljxundda.php

That page also mentions that there are some cases where security restrictions may prevent the cross-browser method from working, which is why some sites use Flash to manipulate the clipboard. Here's an article which discusses that method, in case it sounds like what you want: http://www.jeffothy.com/weblog/clipboard-copy/

EDIT

Have a look at Hyphenator.js. It is a JavaScript method of hyphenating text intelligently on the client side. Quickly playing around with the demo (which can be found here), it appears to leave the hyphens out of copied text. It might be a pain to change your content to use this instead of ­, but it looks like it will achieve all of your goals.