Linebreaks in middle of URL in HTML - html

I have this strange issue, where I get random linebreaks in my HTML when I copy & paste links from mails I get.
The problem is, linebreaks look exactly like any other whitespace and on long lines I have problems seeing if there is any linebreaks.
Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but we are also using emailing system that doesn't like breaklines in middle of an element.
Is there a way to see these without manually scanning all the lines, which is impossible due to amount of mails we are sending.
Regex maybe?
I'm using Notepad++ as an editor.

In Notepad++, you can use "Extended" mode in the FIND Option. Use "\r\n" to scan all the new lines in the file. Use "\r" to find all carriage returns in the file.

Related

write_html() method in fpdf not using font/encoding specified

I'm creating a PDF with a large collection of quotes that I've imported into python with docx2python, using html=True so that they have some tags. I've done some processing to them so they only really have the bold, italics, underline, or break tags. I've sorted them and am trying to write them onto a PDF using the fpdf library, specifically the pdf.write_html(quote) method. The trouble comes with several special characters I have, so I am hoping to encode the PDF to UTF-8. To write with .write_html(), I had to create a new class as shown in their readthedocs under the .write_html() method at the very bottom of the left hand side:
from fpdf import FPDF, HTMLMixin
class htmlFPDF(FPDF, HTMLMixin):
pass
pdf = htmlFPDF()
pdf.add_page()
#set the overall PDF to utf-8 to preserve special characters
pdf.set_doc_option('core_fonts_encoding', 'utf-8')
pdf.write_html(quote) #[![a section of quote giving trouble with quotations][2]][2]
The list of quotes that I have going into the pdf all appear with their special characters and the html tags (<u> or <i>) in the debugger, but after the .write_html() step they then show up in the pdf file with mojibake, even before being saved, as seen through debugger. An example being "dayâ€ÂTMs demands", when it should be "day's demands" (the apostrophe is curled clockwise in the quote, but this textbox doesn't support).
I've tried updating the font I use by
pdf.add_font('NotoSans', '', 'NotoSans-Regular.ttf', uni=True)
pdf.set_font('NotoSans', '', size=12)
added after the .add_page() method, but this doesn't change the current font (or fix mojibake) on the PDF unless I use the more common .write(text_height, quote) method, which renders the underline/italicize tags into the PDF as text. The .write() method does preserve the special characters. I'm not trying to change the font really, but make sure that what's written onto the PDF preserves the special characters instead of mojibake them.
I've also attempted some .encode/.decode action before going into the .write_html(), as well as attempted some methods from the ftfy library. And tried adding '' to the start of each quote to no effect.
If anyone has ideas for a way to iterate through each line on the PDF that'd be terrific, since then I could use ftfy to fix the mojibake. But ideally, it would be some other html tag at the start of each quote or a way to change the font/encoding of the .write_html() method, maybe in the class declaration?
Or if I'm at a dead-end and should just split each quote on '<', use if statements to detect underlines, italicize, etc., and use the .write() method after all.
Extract docx to html works really bad with docx2python. I do this few month ago. I recommend PyDocX. docx2python are good for docx file content extracting, not converting it into a html.

Strange symbol shows up on website (L SEP)?

I noticed on my website, http://www.cscc.org.sg/, there's this odd symbol that shows up.
It says L SEP. In the HTML Code, it display the same thing.
Can someone shows me how to remove them?
That character is U+2028 or HTML entity code 
 which is a kind of newline character. It's not actually supposed to be displayed. I'm guessing that either your server side scripts failed to translate it into a new line or you are using a font that displays it.
But, since we know the HTML and UNICODE vales for the character, we can add a few lines of jQuery that should get rid of the character. Right now, I'm just replacing it with an empty space in the code below. Just add this:
$(document).ready(function() {
$("body").children().each(function() {
$(this).html($(this).html().replace(/
/g," "));
});
});
This should work, though please note that I have not tested this and may not work as none of my browsers will display the character.
But if it doesn't, you can always try pasting your text block onto http://www.nousphere.net/cleanspecial.php which will remove any special characters.
Some fonts render LS as L SEP. Such a glyph is designed for unformatted presentations of the character, such as when viewing the raw characters of a file in a binary editor. In a formatted presentation, actual line spacing should be displayed instead of the glyph.
The problem is that neither the web server nor web browser are interpreting the LS as a newline. The web server could detect the LS and replace it with <br>. Such a feature would fit well with a web server that dynamically generates HTML anyway, but would add overhead and complexity to a web server that serves file contents without modification.
If a LS makes its way to the web browser, the web browser doesn't interpret it as formatting. Page formatting is based only on HTML tags. For example, LF and CR just affect formatting of the HTML source code, not the web page's formatting (except in <pre> sections). The browser could in principle interpret LS and PS (paragraph separator) as <br> and <p>, but the HTML standard doesn't tell browsers to do that. (It seems to me like it would be a good addition.)
To replace the raw LS character with the line separation that the content creator likely intended, you'll need to replace the LS characters with HTML markup such as <br>.
This is the solution for the 'strange symbol' issue.
$(document).ready(function () {
$("body").children().each(function() {
document.body.innerHTML = document.body.innerHTML.replace(/\u2028/g, ' ');
});
})
The jquery/js solutions here work to remove the character, but it broke my Revolution Slider. I ended up doing a search replace for the character on the wp_posts tabel with Better Search Replace plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-search-replace/
When you copy paste the character from a page to the plugin box, it is invisible, but it does work. Before doing DB replaces, always have a database (or full) backup ready! And be sure to uncheck the bottom checkbox to not do a dry run with the plugin.

What type of collation to use in a table

I have what is a simple problem that hopefully has a simple solution:
I have a site written in PHP and HTML, using a Linux server with MySQL.
It has a form where users fill in some personal info, including a textarea in which
they are meant to copy and paste a test CV.
I have also set up a back end for my client where she can query the database to see who
registered and retrieve their info.
My problem is that when I query and echo the content of the table row that contains the
CV (alot of text), the line breaks are all gone - everything is printed in one line.
Does someone know if I can solve this by using the right kind of collation/character encoding
for that specific row that contains the users's cvs? I am hoping that such collation exists that saves and maintains line breaks.
Collation has nothing to do with it - collations and charsets won't touch your newlines at all. If you want to see it, look at the page source of the echo'd text.
HTML, however, treats line breaks like all other whitespace under normal circumstances, so they won't be visible when you echo them to a browser. You shouldn't be outputting plain text as HTML anyway, because they're not the same. You must convert the plain text to HTML first; a simple method is to call htmlspecialchars() and nl2br() on the text (in that order, otherwise htmlspecialchars will eat your newly-created br tags and turn them into <br/>. Failing to do so will not only create undesired output, it can also be a major security risk (XSS).
Use nl2br($text) to add HTML line breaks.
I don't think collation is related to this. Break lines from the textarea come in the form of the \n or \r characters. If you are not doing anything "weird" those break lines should be stored into the DB.
I think your problem is when you echo the content of the table, since the browser doesn't display the \n and \r as new lines, you have to either substitute them for <br/> element or wrap each paragraph in a <p></p>
You can use nl2br() for that.
or how about wrapping the text in a <pre> </pre>
see: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_pre.asp

Perl AJAX stripping html characters out of string?

I have a Perl program that is reading html tags from a text file. (im pretty sure this is working because when i run the perl program on the command line it prints out the HTML like it should be.)
I then pass that "html" to the web page as the return to an ajax request. I then use innerHTML to stick that string into a div.
Heres the problem:
all the text information is getting to where it needs to be. but the "<" ">" and "/" are getting stripped.
any one know the answer to this?
The question is a bit unclear to me without some code and data examples, but if it is what it vaguely sounds like, you may need to HTML-encode your text (e.g. using HTML::Entities).
I'm kind of surprized that's an issue with inserting into innerHTML, but without specific example, that's the first thing which comes to mind
There could be a mod on the server that is removing special characters. Are you running Apache? (I doubt this is what's happening).
If something is being stripped on the client-side, it is most likely in the response handler portion of the AJAX call. Show your code where you stick the string in the div.

HTML encoding issues - "Â" character showing up instead of " "

I've got a legacy app just starting to misbehave, for whatever reason I'm not sure. It generates a bunch of HTML that gets turned into PDF reports by ActivePDF.
The process works like this:
Pull an HTML template from a DB with tokens in it to be replaced (e.g. "~CompanyName~", "~CustomerName~", etc.)
Replace the tokens with real data
Tidy the HTML with a simple regex function that property formats HTML tag attribute values (ensures quotation marks, etc, since ActivePDF's rendering engine hates anything but single quotes around attribute values)
Send off the HTML to a web service that creates the PDF.
Somewhere in that mess, the non-breaking spaces from the HTML template (the s) are encoding as ISO-8859-1 so that they show up incorrectly as an "Â" character when viewing the document in a browser (FireFox). ActivePDF pukes on these non-UTF8 characters.
My question: since I don't know where the problem stems from and don't have time to investigate it, is there an easy way to re-encode or find-and-replace the bad characters? I've tried sending it through this little function I threw together, but it turns it all into gobbledegook doesn't change anything.
Private Shared Function ConvertToUTF8(ByVal html As String) As String
Dim isoEncoding As Encoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1")
Dim source As Byte() = isoEncoding.GetBytes(html)
Return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(Encoding.Convert(isoEncoding, Encoding.UTF8, source))
End Function
Any ideas?
EDIT:
I'm getting by with this for now, though it hardly seems like a good solution:
Private Shared Function ReplaceNonASCIIChars(ByVal html As String) As String
Return Regex.Replace(html, "[^\u0000-\u007F]", " ")
End Function
Somewhere in that mess, the non-breaking spaces from the HTML template (the s) are encoding as ISO-8859-1 so that they show up incorrectly as an "Â" character
That'd be encoding to UTF-8 then, not ISO-8859-1. The non-breaking space character is byte 0xA0 in ISO-8859-1; when encoded to UTF-8 it'd be 0xC2,0xA0, which, if you (incorrectly) view it as ISO-8859-1 comes out as " ". That includes a trailing nbsp which you might not be noticing; if that byte isn't there, then something else has mauled your document and we need to see further up to find out what.
What's the regexp, how does the templating work? There would seem to be a proper HTML parser involved somewhere if your strings are (correctly) being turned into U+00A0 NON-BREAKING SPACE characters. If so, you could just process your template natively in the DOM, and ask it to serialise using the ASCII encoding to keep non-ASCII characters as character references. That would also stop you having to do regex post-processing on the HTML itself, which is always a highly dodgy business.
Well anyway, for now you can add one of the following to your document's <head> and see if that makes it look right in the browser:
for HTML4: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
for HTML5: <meta charset="utf-8">
If you've done that, then any remaining problem is ActivePDF's fault.
If any one had the same problem as me and the charset was already correct, simply do this:
Copy all the code inside the .html file.
Open notepad (or any basic text editor) and paste the code.
Go "File -> Save As"
Enter you file name "example.html" (Select "Save as type: All Files (.)")
Select Encoding as UTF-8
Hit Save and you can now delete your old .html file and the encoding should be fixed
Problem:
Even I was facing the problem where we were sending '£' with some string in POST request to CRM System, but when we were doing the GET call from CRM , it was returning '£' with some string content. So what we have analysed is that '£' was getting converted to '£'.
Analysis:
The glitch which we have found after doing research is that in POST call we have set HttpWebRequest ContentType as "text/xml" while in GET Call it was "text/xml; charset:utf-8".
Solution:
So as the part of solution we have included the charset:utf-8 in POST request and it works.
In my case this (a with caret) occurred in code I generated from visual studio using my own tool for generating code. It was easy to solve:
Select single spaces ( ) in the document. You should be able to see lots of single spaces that are looking different from the other single spaces, they are not selected. Select these other single spaces - they are the ones responsible for the unwanted characters in the browser. Go to Find and Replace with single space ( ). Done.
PS: It's easier to see all similar characters when you place the cursor on one or if you select it in VS2017+; I hope other IDEs may have similar features
In my case I was getting latin cross sign instead of nbsp, even that a page was correctly encoded into the UTF-8. Nothing of above helped in resolving the issue and I tried all.
In the end changing font for IE (with browser specific css) helped, I was using Helvetica-Nue as a body font changing to the Arial resolved the issue .
I was having the same sort of problem. Apparently it's simply because PHP doesn't recognise utf-8.
I was tearing my hair out at first when a '£' sign kept showing up as '£', despite it appearing ok in DreamWeaver. Eventually I remembered I had been having problems with links relative to the index file, when the pages, if viewed directly would work with slideshows, but not when used with an include (but that's beside the point. Anyway I wondered if this might be a similar problem, so instead of putting into the page that I was having problems with, I simply put it into the index.php file - problem fixed throughout.
The reason for this is PHP doesn't recognise utf-8.
Here you can check it for all Special Characters in HTML
http://www.degraeve.com/reference/specialcharacters.php
Well I got this Issue too in my few websites and all i need to do is customize the content fetler for HTML entites. before that more i delete them more i got, so just change you html fiter or parsing function for the page and it worked. Its mainly due to HTML editors in most of CMSs. the way they store parse the data caused this issue (In My case). May this would Help in your case too