I have a method that sets the text for a label, and I'd like to use it to display several lines of text. Is it possible to insert a character into the text for the label to do this?
You have a few choices. If you can trust your callers, you can allow formatted text to be passed into the parameter (so someone can pass "<br />" as part of the label text. If you can slightly trust them, you can still allow that one particular piece of HTML to come through while disallowing others, but you might want to put the intelligence in your function to limit how many breaks can come in one label.
Another (more obscure) choice would be to designate some other character or sequence of characters that you know will never appear on a label to indicate a break (e.g. "#NEWLINE"), and have the function substitute "<br />" wherever that occurs.
Normally a simple <br/> tag will do it!!
Related
I am editing a couple of hundred HTML files and I have to replace all the stuff manually, so I was wondering whether it could be done using regex.I don't think it is possible, but it might be, so please help me out.
Okay, so for example, I have many <p> tags in a file, each with a different class. eg:
<p class="class1">stuff here</p>
<p class="class2">more stuff here</p>
I wanted to replace the "stuff here" and "more stuff here" with something, for example
<p class="class1">[content]</p>
<p class="class2">[content]</p> .
I wanted to know if that is possible.
I'm using notepad++.
P.S. I'm new to regex.
I think notepad++ is great for stuff like this. Open up Find/Replace, and check the regular expressions box in the dialog's Search Mode section.
In the "Find what" field, try this:
\<p\ class\=(.*)\>(.*)\<\/p\>
and in "Replace with":
\<p\ class\=\1\>[content]\<\/p\>
the \1 here will take whatever (found by (.*)) between the class= and the angle bracket > which ends the tag, and replace it with itself, which essentially results in ignoring the class name, rather than having to specify. the second (.*) catches the current content inside the paragraph tag, which is what you want to replace. So where I wrote [content] in the "Replace with" block, that's where you'd put your new content. This does limit you to content that you can paste into the notepad++ find/replace dialog, but I think it has a pretty huge limit.
If I'm remembering that text field's limitations incorrectly, another thing you could do is just adjust my "Replace with" text to just replace the old text with some newlines:
\<p\ class\=\1\>\n\n\<\/p\>
This will delete the old text and leave a clear line where it once was, making it easy to paste whatever you want into the normal editor pane.
The first way is probably better, if your new content will fit the Replace With field, because this regex works once per line. And you can click "Replace" a couple times, and if it's working, clicking "Replace all" will iterate through every <p> element in the file.
Note: this solution assumes that your <p> tags open and close within one line, as you typed them your question description. If they break lines, you're going to want to enable . matches newline in the Replace dialog, and... you need trickier (more precise) syntax than (.*) to catch your class name and content-to-be-replaced. Let me know if this is the the case, and I'll fiddle with it and see if I can help more. The (.*) needs to change to (.*?) or something; the search needs to get more greedy, because if . matches newline, then .* matches any and every possible character infinite times, i.e., the whole document.
I need to show paragraph marks, spaces and other formatting marks in a contenteditable div as you can in MS Word by pressing the Formatting Marks button Formatting Marks button http://blogs.mccombs.utexas.edu/the-most/files/2011/04/show-hide-button-in-outlook.jpg
Is there a simple way to achieve this?
<html>
<head>
<style>
span::after{
color:black;
content:"\00b6";
}
p::after{
color:black;
content:"\00b6";
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h3>
<span class="label">This is the main label</span>
<span class="secondary-label">secondary label</span>
</h3>
<P>Quote me</p>
</body>
</html>
Creating a font which draws spaces as dots and newlines as paragraph marks should solve your problem.
In code it will look like
.editable-div {
font-family: "Your custom font with spaces as dots and stuff", "Actual character font";
}
Here's an article which elaborates on this approach http://www.sitepoint.com/joy-of-subsets-web-fonts/
(I don't have access to Word, but I'm assuming it's the exact same functionality present in most text editors, or InDesign's 'show hidden characters' option &c.)
No, there definitely isn't a simple way to do this, because it's a fairly complex feature.
Your best bet if you really want to do this is to capture the input within the div as a user enters text. Something like Bacon that can easily capture keyed user input as a stream (and allow you to map across the stream) would simplify the process somewhat.
You'll then need to replace* (in realtime) every space/paragraph mark/&c with a relevant marker for the user. The actual input still needs be either saved as typed, or parsed again before saving to strip the new, pretend characters. And though you can use use unicode entities for many of the markers (pilcrows, maybe?), a space (for example) will still show as whitespace (or as the entity code if escaped), so you would need to use a representative icon - essentially, the majority of the hidden characters will each need to have their own specific, defined rendering rules.
This is all fairly nightmarish. It's doable if you can ensure the max amount of text can be kept small, and if you can control what users can enter. For large amounts of text, I can see it becoming horrific: not sure what the JS overhead would be in terms of performance, but I can't imagine it would be particularly good.
* or append - for example newlines/carriage returns etc need to be both displayed as a marker, and actually occur within the contenteditable element.
Edit: What you could do in addition to the above is to edit a font, replacing/adding unicode points for hidden characters instead/as well as visible ones - you would still need to capture input, but this would remove a few headaches. It would deal with spaces quite nicely, for example. Still a bit of a nightmare, but hey.
Is it possible to style the contents of a textarea with CSS? I need to at the very least, insert more space after line breaks.
I want to basically have a new paragraph of text start within the textarea after every carriage return or line break.
You can't style the content of a textarea. All you can do is insert more whitespace manually.
One approach is to replace single carriage returns with double ones
This can be done with either Javascript or PHP...
JS: str.replace("\r\n", "<br />");
http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_replace.asp
PHP: str_replace("\r\n", "<br />", "whatyouaresearching", "number of replacements you want to make")
http://php.net/manual/en/function.str-replace.php
These are "String Replace" functions. So essentially what we are doing is searching a given string for a certain value and replacing it with another value.
Edit: Looks like I may have incorrectly assumed that the text area would interpret correctly. OP, have you tried yet? If that doesn't work, then try using the HTML Entity Code as the replace value:
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_ascii.asp
Whenever I try to submit a text containing special chars like &, via a HTML form in a <textarea>, some chars are lost. (tested in Chrome browser)
So far, I could not find a form attribute to change this behaviour.
How to force the form to submit the input without this loss?
The children of a textarea are bog-standard text nodes. The element doesn't perform any automatic CDATA magic (like a script does).
If you have <textarea>&</textarea> then that means "A textarea element with a default value of 'an ampersand'".
If you want "&" to be the submitted data, then you have to represent the & with a character reference, just like (almost) anywhere else in HTML: <textarea>&</textarea>
OTOH, if you are typing & and the amp; part is being lost, then it is probably because you are taking the value of that form control and treating it as HTML when you want to treat it as text. How you treat it as text instead of HTML depends on what you are using to process the data.
Is there a way to get an <input />-field in HTML to wrap lines if the text is longer than the field using CSS? I don't want to use <textarea /> as I want to avoid users entering hard line-breaks by pressing enter.
No, sorry. <input type=text> is single line by definition. See the W3C document Forms in HTML Documents:
text
Creates a single-line text input control.
Using Dojo's Dijit TextArea form control, based off TextArea, you can have an input field which begins as a single line and expands as the user adds to it.
See its documentation.
You can't do what you want with CSS alone, but you could use JavaScript to prevent the user from entering line breaks in a <textarea> field.
Look at this,
http://www.echoecho.com/htmlforms08.htm
The wrap options are the most tricky part of text areas.
If you turn wrap off the text is handled as one long sequence of text without linebreaks.
If you set it to virtual the text appears on your page as if it recognized linebreaks - but when the form is submitted the linebreaks are turned off.
If you set it to physical the text is submitted exactly as it appears on the screen - linebreaks included.
Your best bet is use a textarea (with autogrow capabilities if you like), and then strip out the new lines when the form is submitted. Using php it would be something like this:
$text = str_replace(array("\n","\r"),'',$_POST['text_field']);
This would have the desired effect of blocking newline characters. As others have pointed out it's not really possible to get multi-line input in an input field.