How can I show HTML snippets on a webpage without needing to replace each < with < and > with >?
In other words, is there a tag for don't render HTML until you hit the closing tag?
The tried and true method for HTML:
Replace the & character with &
Replace the < character with <
Replace the > character with >
Optionally surround your HTML sample with <pre> and/or <code> tags.
sample 1:
<pre>
This text has
been formatted using
the HTML pre tag. The brower should
display all white space
as it was entered.
</pre>
sample 2:
<pre>
<code>
My pre-formatted code
here.
</code>
</pre>
sample 3:
(If you are actually "quoting" a block of code, then the markup would be)
<blockquote>
<pre>
<code>
My pre-formatted "quoted" code here.
</code>
</pre>
</blockquote>
is there a tag for don't render HTML until you hit the closing tag?
No, there is not. In HTML proper, there’s no way short of escaping some characters:
& as &
< as <
(Incidentally, there is no need to escape > but people often do it for reasons of symmetry.)
And of course you should surround the resulting, escaped HTML code within <pre><code>…</code></pre> to (a) preserve whitespace and line breaks, and (b) mark it up as a code element.
All other solutions, such as wrapping your code into a <textarea> or the (deprecated) <xmp> element, will break.1
XHTML that is declared to the browser as XML (via the HTTP Content-Type header! — merely setting a DOCTYPE is not enough) could alternatively use a CDATA section:
<![CDATA[Your <code> here]]>
But this only works in XML, not in HTML, and even this isn’t a foolproof solution, since the code mustn’t contain the closing delimiter ]]>. So even in XML the simplest, most robust solution is via escaping.
1 Case in point:
textarea {border: none; width: 100%;}
<textarea readonly="readonly">
<p>Computer <textarea>says</textarea> <span>no.</span>
</textarea>
<xmp>
Computer <xmp>says</xmp> <span>no.</span>
</xmp>
Kind of a naive method to display code will be including it in a textarea and add disabled attribute so its not editable.
<textarea disabled> code </textarea>
Hope that help someone looking for an easy way to get stuff done.
But warning, this won't escape the tags for you, as you can see here (the following obviously does not work):
<textarea disabled>
This is the code to create a textarea:
<textarea></textarea>
</textarea>
Deprecated, but works in FF3 and IE8.
<xmp>
<b>bold</b><ul><li>list item</li></ul>
</xmp>
Recommended:
<pre><code>
code here, escape it yourself.
</code></pre>
i used <xmp> just like this :
http://jsfiddle.net/barnameha/hF985/1/
The deprecated <xmp> tag essentially does that but is no longer part of the XHTML spec. It should still work though in all current browsers.
Here's another idea, a hack/parlor trick, you could put the code in a textarea like so:
<textarea disabled="true" style="border: none;background-color:white;">
<p>test</p>
</textarea>
Putting angle brackets and code like this inside a text area is invalid HTML and will cause undefined behavior in different browsers. In Internet Explorer the HTML is interpreted, whereas Mozilla, Chrome and Safari leave it uninterpreted.
If you want it to be non-editable and look different then you could easily style it using CSS. The only issue would be that browsers will add that little drag handle in the bottom-right corner to resize the box. Or alternatively, try using an input tag instead.
The right way to inject code into your textarea is to use server side language like this PHP for example:
<textarea disabled="true" style="border: none;background-color:white;">
<?php echo '<p>test</p>'; ?>
</textarea>
Then it bypasses the html interpreter and puts uninterpreted text into the textarea consistently across all browsers.
Other than that, the only way is really to escape the code yourself if static HTML or using server-side methods such as .NET's HtmlEncode() if using such technology.
If your goal is to show a chunk of code that you're executing elsewhere on the same page, you can use textContent (it's pure-js and well supported: http://caniuse.com/#feat=textcontent)
<div id="myCode">
<p>
hello world
</p>
</div>
<div id="loadHere"></div>
document.getElementById("myCode").textContent = document.getElementById("loadHere").innerHTML;
To get multi-line formatting in the result, you need to set css style "white-space: pre;" on the target div, and write the lines individually using "\r\n" at the end of each.
Here's a demo: https://jsfiddle.net/wphps3od/
This method has an advantage over using textarea: Code wont be reformatted as it would in a textarea. (Things like are removed entirely in a textarea)
In HTML? No.
In XML/XHTML? You could use a CDATA block.
I assume:
you want to write 100% valid HTML5
you want to place the code snippet (almost) literal in the HTML
especially < should not need escaping
All your options are in this tree:
with HTML syntax
there are five kinds of elements
those called "normal elements" (like <p>)
can't have a literal <
it would be considered the start of the next tag or comment
void elements
they have no content
you could put your HTML in a data attribute (but this is true for all elements)
that would need JavaScript to move the data elsewhere
in double-quoted attributes, " and &thing; need escaping: " and &thing; respectively
raw text elements
<script> and <style> only
they are never rendered visible
but embedding your text in Javascript might be feasable
Javascript allows for multi-line strings with backticks
it could then be inserted dynamically
a literal </script is not allowed anywhere in <script>
escapable raw text elements
<textarea> and <title> only
<textarea> is a good candidate to wrap code in
it is totally legal to write </html> in there
not legal is the substring </textarea for obvious reasons
escape this special case with </textarea or similar
&thing; needs escaping: &thing;
foreign elements
elements from MathML and SVG namespaces
at least SVG allows embedding of HTML again...
and CDATA is allowed there, so it seems to have potential
with XML syntax
covered by Konrad's answer
Note: > never needs escaping. Not even in normal elements.
It's vey simple ....
Use this xmp code
<xmp id="container">
<xmp >
<p>a paragraph</p>
</xmp >
</xmp>
<textarea ><?php echo htmlentities($page_html); ?></textarea>
works fine for me..
"keeping in mind Alexander's suggestion, here is why I think this is a good approach"
if we just try plain <textarea> it may not always work since there may be closing textarea tags which may wrongly close the parent tag and display rest of the HTML source on the parent document, which would look awkward.
using htmlentities converts all applicable characters such as < > to HTML entities which eliminates any possibility of leaks.
There maybe benefits or shortcomings to this approach or a better way of achieving the same results, if so please comment as I would love to learn from them :)
This is a simple trick and I have tried it in Safari and Firefox
<code>
<span><</span>meta property="og:title" content="A very fine cuisine" /><br>
<span><</span>meta property="og:image" content="http://www.example.com/image.png" />
</code>
It will show like this:
You can see it live Here
You could try:
Hello! Here is some code:
<xmp>
<div id="hello">
</div>
</xmp>
This is a bit of a hack, but we can use something like:
body script {
display: block;
font-family: monospace;
white-space: pre;
}
<script type="text/html">
<h1>Hello World</h1>
<ul>
<li>Enjoy this dodgy hack,
<li>or don't!
</ul>
</script>
With that CSS, the browser will display scripts inside the body. It won’t attempt to execute this script, as it has an unknown type text/html. It’s not necessary to escape special characters inside a <script>, unless you want to include a closing </script> tag.
I’m using something like this to display executable JavaScript in the body of the page, for a sort of "literate progamming".
There’s some more info in this question When should tags be visible and why can they?.
function escapeHTML(string)
{
var pre = document.createElement('pre');
var text = document.createTextNode(string);
pre.appendChild(text);
return pre.innerHTML;
}//end escapeHTML
it will return the escaped Html
Ultimately the best (though annoying) answer is "escape the text".
There are however a lot of text editors -- or even stand-alone mini utilities -- that can do this automatically. So you never should have to escape it manually if you don't want to (Unless it's a mix of escaped and un-escaped code...)
Quick Google search shows me this one, for example: http://malektips.com/zzee-text-utility-html-escape-regular-expression.html
This is by far the best method for most situations:
<pre><code>
code here, escape it yourself.
</code></pre>
I would have up voted the first person who suggested it but I don't have reputation. I felt compelled to say something though for the sake of people trying to find answers on the Internet.
You could use a server side language like PHP to insert raw text:
<?php
$str = <<<EOD
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="description" content="Minimal HTML5">
<meta name="keywords" content="HTML5,Minimal">
<title>This is the title</title>
<link rel='stylesheet.css' href='style.css'>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
EOD;
?>
then dump out the value of $str htmlencoded:
<div style="white-space: pre">
<?php echo htmlentities($str); ?>
</div>
There are a few ways to escape everything in HTML, none of them nice.
Or you could put in an iframe that loads a plain old text file.
Actually there is a way to do this. It has limitation (one), but is 100% standard, not deprecated (like xmp), and works.
And it's trivial. Here it is:
<div id="mydoc-src" style="display: none;">
LlNnlljn77fggggkk77csJJK8bbJBKJBkjjjjbbbJJLJLLJo
<!--
YOUR CODE HERE.
<script src="WidgetsLib/all.js"></script>
^^ This is a text, no side effects trying to load it.
-->
LlNnlljn77fggggkk77csJJK8bbJBKJBkjjjjbbbJJLJLLJo
</div>
Please let me explain. First of all, ordinary HTML comment does the job, to prevent whole block be interpreted. You can easily add in it any tags, all of them will be ignored. Ignored from interpretation, but still available via innerHTML! So what is left, is to get the contents, and filter the preceding and trailing comment tokens.
Except (remember - the limitation) you can't put there HTML comments inside, since (at least in my Chrome) nesting of them is not supported, and very first '-->' will end the show.
Well, it is a nasty little limitation, but in certain cases it's not a problem at all, if your text is free of HTML comments. And, it's easier to escape one construct, then a whole bunch of them.
Now, what is that weird LlNnlljn77fggggkk77csJJK8bbJBKJBkjjjjbbbJJLJLLJo string? It's a random string, like a hash, unlikely to be used in the block, and used for? Here's the context, why I have used it. In my case, I took the contents of one DIV, then processed it with Showdown markdown, and then the output assigned into another div. The idea was, to write markdown inline in the HTML file, and just open in a browser and it would transform on the load on-the-fly. So, in my case, <!-- became transformed to <p><!--</p>, the comment properly escaped. It worked, but polluted the screen. So, to easily remove it with regex, the random string was used. Here's the code:
var converter = new showdown.Converter();
converter.setOption('simplifiedAutoLink', true);
converter.setOption('tables', true);
converter.setOption('tasklists', true);
var src = document.getElementById("mydoc-src");
var res = document.getElementById("mydoc-res");
res.innerHTML = converter.makeHtml(src.innerHTML)
.replace(/<p>.{0,10}LlNnlljn77fggggkk77csJJK8bbJBKJBkjjjjbbbJJLJLLJo.{0,10}<\/p>/g, "");
src.innerHTML = '';
And it works.
If somebody is interested, this article is written using this technique. Feel free to download, and look inside the HTML file.
It depends what you are using it for. Is it user input? Then use <textarea>, and escape everything. In my case, and probably it's your case too, I simply used comments, and it does the job.
If you don't use markdown, and just want to get it as is from a tag, then it's even simpler:
<div id="mydoc-src" style="display: none;">
<!--
YOUR CODE HERE.
<script src="WidgetsLib/all.js"></script>
^^ This is a text, no side effects trying to load it.
-->
</div>
and JavaScript code to get it:
var src = document.getElementById("mydoc-src");
var YOUR_CODE = src.innerHTML.replace(/(<!--|-->)/g, "");
This is how I did it:
$str = file_get_contents("my-code-file.php");
echo "<textarea disabled='true' style='border: none;background-color:white;'>";
echo $str;
echo "</textarea>";
It may not work in every situation, but placing code snippets inside of a textarea will display them as code.
You can style the textarea with CSS if you don't want it to look like an actual textarea.
If you are looking for a solution that works with frameworks.
const code = `
<div>
this will work in react
<div>
`
<pre>
<code>{code}</code>
</pre>
And you can give it a nice look with css:
pre code {
background-color: #eee;
border: 1px solid #999;
display: block;
padding: 20px;
}
JavaScript string literals can be used to write the HTML across multiple lines. Obviously, JavaScript, ECMA6 in particular, is required for this solution.
.createTextNode paired with CSS white-space: pre-wrap; does the trick.
.innerText alone also works. Run code snippet below.
let codeBlock = `
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>My Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to my page</h1>
<p>I like cars and lorries and have a big Jeep!</p>
<h2>Where I live</h2>
<p>I live in a small hut on a mountain!</p>
</body>
</html>
`
const codeElement = document.querySelector("#a");
let textNode = document.createTextNode(codeBlock);
codeElement.appendChild(textNode);
const divElement = document.querySelector("#b");
divElement.innerText = codeBlock;
#a {
white-space: pre-wrap;
}
<div id=a>
</div>
<div id=b>
</div>
//To show xml tags in table columns you will have to encode the tags first
function htmlEncode(value) {
//create a in-memory div, set it's inner text(which jQuery automatically encodes)
//then grab the encoded contents back out. The div never exists on the page.
return $('<div/>').text(value).html();
}
html = htmlEncode(html)
A combination of a couple answers that work together here:
function c(s) {
return s.split("<").join("<").split(">").join(">").split("&").join("&")
}
displayMe.innerHTML = ok.innerHTML;
console.log(
c(ok.innerHTML)
)
<textarea style="display:none" id="ok">
<script>
console.log("hello", 5&9);
</script>
</textarea>
<div id="displayMe">
</div>
I used this a long time ago and it did the trick for me, I hope it helps you too.
var preTag = document.querySelectorAll('pre');
console.log(preTag.innerHTML);
for (var i = 0; i < preTag.length; i++) {
var pattern = preTag[i].innerHTML;
pattern = pattern.replace(/</g, "<").replace(/>/g, ">");
console.log(pattern);
preTag[i].innerHTML = pattern;
}
<pre>
<p>example</p>
<span>more text</span>
</pre>
You can separate the tags by changing them to spans.
Like this:
<span><</span> <!-- opening bracket of h1 here -->
<span>h1></span> <!-- opening tag of h1 completed here -->
<span>hello</span> <!-- text to print -->
<span><</span> <!-- closing h1 tag's bracket here -->
<span>/h1></span> <!-- closing h1 tag ends here -->
And also, you can just only add the <(opening angle bracket) to the spans
<span><</span> <!-- opening bracket of h1 here -->
h1> <!-- opening tag of h1 completed here -->
hello <!-- text to print -->
<span><</span> <!-- closing h1 tag's bracket here -->
/h1><!-- closing h1 tag ends here -->
<code><?php $str='<';echo htmlentities($str);?></code>
I found this to be the easiest, fastest and most compact.
Is it possible in CSS (only) to hide some text of a string?
I know there these attribute-selectores like:
[att^=val] – the “begins with” selector
But for instance, having this:
<div class="some_random_text">
This is a default text
</div>
I want to (display: none) only a certain substring - in thise case "default". I know how to do it with JS, but I'm looking for a CSS-solution only (if there is any).
Even though I guess it isn't possible to manipulate the DOM via CSS, which would be neccessary to have something like:
this is a <span class="hideThis">default</span> text
why would you need this and where does it occur?
For instance in a CMS (in my case OXID). You can add a title to a specific payment-method. Here I have
paypal
paypal (provider1)
paypal (another dude)
I want to have only PayPal visible in the frontend. The other PayPal-Paymenttypes have to remain however. Naming them all PayPal just leads to confusion.
there is the content-property. Is it somehow managable with that?
Again, no JS :-)
To answer your question - no, it's not possible using only CSS.
You can;
Edit the HTML as you suggested
this is a <.span class="hideThis">default<.span > text
Use JS to alter the elements innerHTML value
Use a pre-processing language (like PHP or ASP, whatever you are able to use) to reduce the string to a substring.
Sorry if that's not the answer you wanted, but those are your options.
It it not possible. The only thing that can actually modify the inside text is the content property. Assuming something changes in your dom, you can have rules like:
.some_random_text:after {
content: "This is a text";
}
other_select .some_random_text:after {
content: "This is a default text";
}
But sincerely, I don't get the point, as JS and consors are made for that.
It's not possible, here's the documentation on selectors: https://www.w3.org/TR/css3-selectors/#selectors
I've build a page with a form and for some reason my button for the form and my footer element is not showing up on the page.
I have added a link so you can check out my code. And I know its a HOT MESS! so if you can give me any tips on the css and html please feel free to let me know.
http://jsfiddle.net/jeramiewinchell/j6n0w1tj/
enter code here
Fair point in the edit. I said it was a mess without giving anything positive.
Here are some tips that could improve the HTML (with links for reference):
You should specify a doctype (e.g.: <!doctype html>) instead of having an empty <!DOCTYPE> tag.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup/syntax.html#doctype-syntax
It would be nice to have a <html> wrapping everything, and a <head> wrapping the title and links. I'm not clear if it's technically valid not to have them (the W3C HTML validator will not validate a page without a <head> although it will validate without the <html>), but it's nice and it will help keep things organized.
The links should have a type indicating the mime type (in this case type="text/css").
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_link.asp
Closing empty elements (e.g.: img, link, input) is not mandatory in HTML5, but it is in XHTML. Depending on the doctype that you choose, you should close them accordingly. Using /> at the end is valid for both HTML5 and XHTML, so you may want to consider it.
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201005/void_empty_elements_and_self-closing_start_tags_in_html/
Don't nest <p> tags. Paragraphs are block elements that should contain only phrasing content (= not block/paragraph elements). How to fix it: replace <p class="site_section1"> with a <div class="site_section1">.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/grouping-content.html#the-p-element
Always close the block tags that you open. For example, you never close the <p class="site_section1"> (altough as I said in the previous point, you should making it a <div>... and then close it). The result in the browser may be unpredictable.
I mentioned in my comment above (sorry, I don't know the name in English), you should avoid crossed tags/nesting of tags. This is incorrect: <label>...<select></label>...</select>, it should be <label>...</label><select>...</select>.
Again, not mandatory but it could be nice to set a value attribute in the <option> tags. If you don't specify a value, the value sent will be the content inside between the <option> tags (that may be what you want in this case).
Don't forget all the code and to close the tags correctly! Things like this: <button type="submit">Save</buttons </div> can have disastrous results (although it looks more of a typo to me).
Don't close tags twice (e.g.: you have </body> twice)
And for the CSS (also with some links for reference):
Avoid unnecessary styling. E.g.: border-radius:0px is unnecessary because 0 is the default value for border-radius (unless you have defined some previous style and you want to overwrite it).
http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_border-radius.asp
Specifying units is required for values different than 0. E.g.: margin-left:15 is that 15 in px or em?
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#length-units
The units are optional when the value is 0. Some people find it more readable and better because it is shorter; I personally like them. Your call, but always:
Be consistent: if you omit the units for a zero value, do it in all your definitions. It looks awkward to me to see a padding:0 (without units) next to a margin:0px. It will help you read and maintain the code later.
You could merge many styles together. For example: .zonelist23, .zonelist24, and .zonelist25 are the same, you could define one style only (e.g.: .zonelist_bml30) or set all of them together: .zonelist23, .zonelist24, .zonelist25 { ... }
Not mandatory, but nice: The font-family tag should have several names as a "fallback" system. That way, if the browser does not support the first font, it will go to the next and so on.
http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_font.asp
Just out of curiosity: did you meant to put in the stylesheet .header or is it header? I personally try to avoid classes/ids with the same name as a tag to keep the code easier to understand, but that's a personal choice. As far as I know there's nothing against naming a class like a tag.
One way of having fun and learning (you may now think that I have a strange way of having fun and learning):
Go to the W3C HTML Validator.
Click on the the "validate by direct input" tab.
Copy your code in the box.
Click on the "Validate" button.
View the first error, and read the comments (visit the links for reference).
Fix the code according to what you've read.
Click on the "Revalidate" button.
Repeat steps 5-7 until no errors are found.
(You can do the same with the CSS in the W3C CSS Validator)
Please see this fiddle : http://jsfiddle.net/j6n0w1tj/1/
I have corrected your code.
Kindly follow the steps mentioned by #monty82, who has given an excellent explanation on how to proceed with your code.
Wrong html:
<label>..<select></Label><option></option></select>
Correct html
<label>..</label><select><option></option></select>
Tags like <input>,<br> are self closing tags,close it like <input
type="radio"/> and <br/> not as </br>.
Please make sure whether your opening and closing tags match
This question already has answers here:
How to display raw HTML code on an HTML page
(30 answers)
Closed 3 years ago.
I'd like to add an area to a page where all of the dynamic content is rendered as plain text instead of markup. For example:
<myMagicTag>
<b>Hello</b> World
</myMagicTag>
I want the <b> tag to show up as just text and not as a bold directive. I'd rather not have to write the code to convert every "<" to an "<".
I know that <textarea> will do it, but it has other undesirable side effects like adding scroll bars.
Does myMagicTag exist?
Edit: A jQuery or javascript function that does this would also be ok. Can't do it server-side, unfortunately.
You can do this with the script element (bolded by me):
The script element allows authors to include dynamic script and data blocks in their documents.
Example:
<script type="text/plain">
This content has the media type plain/text, so characters reserved in HTML have no special meaning here: <div> ← this will be displayed.
</script>
(Note that the allowed content of the script element is restricted, e.g. you can’t have </script> as text content (it would close the script element).)
Typically, script elements have display:none by default in browser’s CSS, so you’d need to overwrite that in your CSS, e.g.:
script[type="text/plain"] {display:block;}
You can use a function to escape the < >, eg:
'span.name': function(){
return this.name.replace(/</g, '<').replace(/>/g, '>');
}
Also take a look at <plaintext></plaintext>. I haven't used it myself but it is known to render everything that follows as plain text(by everything i mean to say it ignores the closing tag, so all the following code is rendered as text)
The tag used to be <XMP> but in HTML 4 it was already deprecated. Browser's don't seem to have dropped its support but I would not recommend it for anything beyond quick debugging. The MDN article about <XMP> lists two other tags, <plaintext> and <listing>, that were deprecated even earlier. I'm not aware of any current alternative.
Whatever, the code to encode plain text into HTML is pretty straightforward in most programming languages.
Note: the term similar means exactly that—all three are designed to inject plain text into HTML. I'm not implying that they are synonyms or that they behave identically—they don't.
There is no specific tag except the deprecated <xmp>.
But a script tag is allowed to store unformatted data.
Here is the only solution so far showing dynamic content, as you wanted.
Run code snippet for more info.
<script id="myMagicTag" type="text/plain" style="display:block;">
<b>Hello</b> World
</script>
Use Visible Data-blocks
<script>
document.querySelector("#myMagicTag").innerHTML = "<b>Unformatted</b> dynamic content"
</script>
No, that's not possible, you need to HtmlEncode it.
If your using a server-side language, that's not really difficult though.
In .NET you would do something like this:
string encodedtext = HttpContext.Current.Server.HtmlEncode(plaintext);
In my application, I need to prevent HTML from rendering
"if (a<b || c>100) ..."
and
"cout << ...".
Also the entire C++ code region HTML must pass through the GCC compiler with the desired effect. I've hit on two schemes:
First:
//<xmp>
#include <string>
//</xmp>}
For reasons that escape me, the <xmp> tag is deprecated. I find (2016-01-09) that Chrome and FF, at least, render the tag the way I want. While researching my problem, I saw a remark that <xmp> is required in HTML 5.
Second, in <head> ... </head>, insert:
<style type="text/css">
textarea { border: none; }
</style>
Then in <body> ... </body>, write:
//<br /> <textarea rows="4" disabled cols="80">
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
//</textarea> <br />
Note: Set "cols="80" to prevent following text from appearing on the right. Set "rows=..." to one more line than you enclose in the tag. This prevents scroll bars. This second technique has several disadvantages:
The "disabled" attribute shades the region
Incomprehensible, complex comments in the code sent to the compiler
Harder to understand
More typing
However, this methhod is neither obsolete nor deprecated. The gods of HTML will make their faces to shine unto you.
I have a situation as follows
<body>
Test<br />
test<br />
test1<br />
</body>
I need to add a tab after the 2nd test and 3rd test
so that it looks similar to this.
Test
test
test1
Is there a special HTML entity or special character for TAB. eg. Non-breaking space == & nbsp ;
thanks
The simplest way I can think of would be to place the text in nested divs. Then add margin to the left of div. It will cascade down, giving you indentation.
<div id='testing'>
Test1
<div>
Test2
<div>
Test3
</div>
</div>
</div>
With the CSS:
#testing div {
margin-left: 10px;/*or whatever indentation size you want*/
}
With those, you'll get a nice tree, no matter how many levels deep you want to go.
EDIT: You can also use padding-left if you want.
If you really want to use tabs (== tabulator characters), you have to go with the following solution, which I don't recommend:
<pre>
test
test
test
</pre>
or replace the <pre/> with <div style="white-space: pre" /> to achieve the same effect as with the pre element. You can even enter a literal tab character instead of the escaped .
I don't recommend it for most usages, because it is not really semantic, that is, from viewing the HTML source a program cannot deduce any useful information (like, e.g., "this is a heading" or such). You'd be better off using one of the nice margin-left examples of the other answers. However, if you'd like to display some stuff like source code or the such, the above solution would do it.
Cheers,
Ye gods, tables?
Looks like an obvious use-case for lists, with variable margin and list-style-type: none; seasoned to taste.
See Making a 'Tab' in HTML by Neha Sinha:
Preformatted
You can put tab characters in your HTML directly if
you use what’s called “preformatted”
text.In HTML, surround text that you
want “preformatted” in a pair of
“<pre>” and “</pre>” start and end
tags.
Tables
You can use a html table so that everything you put within the set of rows(<tr>) and
columns(<td>) shows up the same way. You can very well hide the table borders to show the text alone.
Using the <dd> Tag
The <dd> tag is for formatting definitions. But it
also will create a line break and make
a tab!
, The Non-Breaking Space
One bit of HTML code I used in the table example is the “non-breaking space,” encoded as in HTML. This just gives you some space. Combined with a line break, <br>, you can create some tab-like effects.
Example
Test<br/>
<pre> </pre>test<br/>
<pre> </pre>test1<br/>
this should render as:
Test
test
test1
There have been a variety of good and bad answers so far but it seems no-one has addressed the way that you can choose between the solutions.
The first question to ask is "What is the relationship between the data being displayed?". Once this has been answered it the HTML structure you use should be obvious.
Please update the question explaining more about the structure of the content you need to display and you should find that you get better answers. At the moment everything from using <pre> to tables might be the best solution.
I think that easiest thing to do is to use UL/LI html tags and then to manipulate (and remove if needed) symbols in front of list with CSS.
Then you get something like:
Test
Test2
Test 3
More info + working example you can try out.
If you need to display tabs (tabulator characters), use a PRE element (or any element with the white-space: pre; CSS applied to it).
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Test</title>
<style type="text/css">
pre { white-space: pre; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<p>This is a normal paragraph, blah blah blah.</p>
<pre>This is preformatted text contained within a <code>PRE</code> element. Oh, and here are some tab characters, each of which are displayed between two arrows: ← → ← → ← → ← →</pre>
</body>
</html>
You can also use the HTML entity instead of the actual tab character.
I am not a fan of using CSS to simulate a Tab Character.
For Indenting, yes, by all means use CSS - but not for Tab Characters.
For a single Tab, I would replace with " " (4 Spaces).
This is similar to what was used to format your Question for display.
The added benefit to this is (if someone copies your text)
it will preserve the spacing when pasted into Word or Notepad.
Example:
Test<br />
test<br />
test1
Note: If your text is in a <pre> tag, then #Boldewyn's answer is the better option.
Keep in mind, the text in the <pre> tag may render differently than expected.
I realize this is an old post, however someone may want to use the following list in order to create an indented list (by using a description list)
In my opinion, this is a much cleaner way than many of the other answers here and may be the best way to go:
It does not use a bunch of whitespace characters (which gives little control in terms of formatting for styles)
It does not use the <pre> tag, which should only be used for formatting (in my opinion, this should pretty much be a last resort or a special-case use in HTML); <pre> tag is also whitespace-dependent and not CSS dependent when used the way it is intended to be used
w3schools says to use the <pre> element when displaying text with unusual formatting, or some sort of computer code.
description lists allow for more control in terms of formatting and hierarchy
The answer by #geowa4, I would say, is another great way to accomplish this. <div>s allow for style control and, depending on use/objective, his answer may be the best way to go.
<dl>
<dt>Test</dt>
<dd>
<dl>
<dt>test</dt>
<dd>test1</dd>
</dl>
</dd>
</dl>