[Typo3] Help with HTML Parsers

[Joerg Sauer]

Hello list,

after having worked with Typo3 for some time now and finding answers to many, 
many questions in the documentation and on this list, I finally seem to be 
stuck.

The problem sounds simple, and I am sure it has been solved in a lot of 
installations, but for some reason I cannot make this work:

All I want to to do is have certain tags that are entered in the RTE (I use 
the rtehtmlarea extension) replaced by other tags before they are written to 
the DB. In particular, I want this to happen to the <b> and <i> tags which I 
want to be replaced with <strong> and <em> respectively.

Searching through the lists and on Google I got the impression that this 
problem comes up frequently, yet none of the suggested methods seemed to 
work.

I tried various approches using HTMLparser_db and HTMLparser_rte but I am not 
sure I really understand the logic behind it. For example I tried:

RTE.config.tt_content.bodytext.proc.entryHTMLparser_db = 1
RTE.config.tt_content.bodytext.proc.entryHTMLparser_db {
tags.b.remap = strong
tags.i.remap = em
}

This *looks* to me like it should take care of remapping the tags but 
apparently I am missing something because all I get is <b>, both in the RTE 
and on the rendered site on the frontend.

Some parameters of my installation: Typo3 3.7.0, HTMLarea, css_styled_content

Note: I am not looking for a solution that replaces the tags only for 
rendering - I can do that with HTML Tidy. I really want the DB to contain 
only logical emphasis, not <b> and <i>.

I would be most grateful for any hints or even pointers to useful 
documentation.

Thanks a lot and best regards,
Joerg