I am trying to take the string "<BR>" in VB.NET and convert it to HTML through XSLT. When the HTML comes out, though, it looks like this:
<BR>
I can only assume it goes ahead and tries to render it. Is there any way I can convert those </> back into the brackets so I get the line break I'm trying for?
Check the XSLT has:
<xsl:output method="html"/>
edit: explanation from comments
By default XSLT outputs as XML(1) which means it will escape any significant characters. You can override this in specific instances with the attribute disable-output-escaping="yes" (intro here) but much more powerful is to change the output to the explicit value of HTML which confides same benefit globally, as the following:
For script and style elements, replace any escaped characters (such
as & and >) with their actual values
(& and >, respectively).
For attributes, replace any occurrences of > with >.
Write empty elements such as <br>, <img>, and <input> without
closing tags or slashes.
Write attributes that convey information by their presence as
opposed to their value, such as
checked and selected, in minimized
form.
from a solid IBM article covering the subject, more recent coverage from stylusstudio here
If HTML output is what you desire HTML output is what you should specify.
(1) There is actually corner case where output defaults to HTML, but I don't think it's universal and it's kind of obtuse to depend on it.
Try wraping it with <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><br></xsl:text>
Don't know about XSLT but..
One workaround might be using HttpUtility.HtmlDecode from System.Web namespace.
using System;
using System.Web;
class Program
{
static void Main()
{
Console.WriteLine(HttpUtility.HtmlDecode("<br>"));
Console.ReadKey();
}
}
...
Got it! On top of the selected answer, I also did something similar to this on my string:
htmlString = htmlString.Replace("<","<")
htmlString = htmlString.Replace(">",">")
I think, though, that in the end, I may just end up using <pre> tags to preserve everything.
The string "<br>" is already HTML so you can just Response.Write("<br>").
But you meantion XSLT so I imagine there some transform going on. In that case surely the transform should be inserting it at the correct place as a node. A better question will likely get a better answer
Related
I would like to add things like bullet points "•" to HTML using the XML Builder in Nokogiri, but everything is being escaped. How do I prevent it from being escaped?
I would like the result to be:
<span>•</span>
rather than:
<span>•</span>
I'm just doing this:
xml.span {
xml.text "•\ "
}
What am I missing?
If you define
class Nokogiri::XML::Builder
def entity(code)
doc = Nokogiri::XML("<?xml version='1.0'?><root>&##{code};</root>")
insert(doc.root.children.first)
end
end
then this
builder = Nokogiri::XML::Builder.new do |xml|
xml.span {
xml.text "I can has "
xml.entity 8665
xml.text " entity?"
}
end
puts builder.to_xml
yields
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<span>I can has • entity?</span>
PS this a workaround only, for a clean solution please refer to the libxml2 documentation (Nokogiri is built on libxml2) for more help. However, even these folks admit that handling entities can be quite ..err, cumbersome sometimes.
When you're setting the text of an element, you really are setting text, not HTML source. < and & don't have any special meaning in plain text.
So just type a bullet: '•'. Of course your source code and your XML file will have to be using the same encoding for that to come out right. If your XML file is UTF-8 but your source code isn't, you'd probably have to say '\xe2\x80\xa2' which is the UTF-8 byte sequence for the bullet character as a string literal.
(In general non-ASCII characters in Ruby 1.8 are tricky. The byte-based interfaces don't mesh too well with XML's world of all-text-is-Unicode.)
When working with CSS inside of XML such as
<span class="IwuvAS3"></span>
when parsed in flash, if I don't use CDATA like the following:
<![CDATA[<span class="IwuvAS3"></span>]]>
then the parsed data drops down a line for every "<" character it sees.
When parsing the data into a single-line text field, nothing was shown because it was actually down a line. Soon as I wrap it inside of CDATA it works great. I have played with prettyIndent, and as I understand ignoreWhite is true by default.
Is there a way to parse the data without the use of CDATA and keep the implied line breaks out?
EDIT 1 (10/10/08): Thank you, but I am actually looking for a Function or Method. Escaping each is much more cumbersome than using CDATA. The only reason I don't want to use CDATA is that I was taught to stay clear of it. If ActionScript has a method associated to E4X XML handling that will remove the requirement to wrap my XML in CDATA, I would love to know about it.
EDIT 1 (10/15/08): Thanks Philippe! I never would have thought that HTML formatting in Flash is treated as whitespace. The answer was
textField.condenseWhite = true;
<3AS3
Set the TextField's condenseWhite property to true - so only < br/> tags will generate linebreaks.
You could escape the "<" characters (and &, ", >, ', among others) as entities instead.
I am not very good with Regex but I am learning.
I would like to remove some html tag by the class name. This is what I have so far :
<div class="footer".*?>(.*?)</div>
The first .*? is because it might contain other attribute and the second is it might contain other html stuff.
What am I doing wrong? I have try a lot of set without success.
Update
Inside the DIV it can contain multiple line and I am playing with Perl regex.
As other people said, HTML is notoriously tricky to deal with using regexes, and a DOM approach might be better. E.g.:
use HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath;
my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath->new;
$tree->parse_file( 'yourdocument.html' );
for my $node ( $tree->findnodes( '//*[#class="footer"]' ) ) {
$node->replace_with_content; # delete element, but not the children
}
print $tree->as_HTML;
You will also want to allow for other things before class in the div tag
<div[^>]*class="footer"[^>]*>(.*?)</div>
Also, go case-insensitive. You may need to escape things like the quotes, or the slash in the closing tag. What context are you doing this in?
Also note that HTML parsing with regular expressions can be very nasty, depending on the input. A good point is brought up in an answer below - suppose you have a structure like:
<div>
<div class="footer">
<div>Hi!</div>
</div>
</div>
Trying to build a regex for that is a recipe for disaster. Your best bet is to load the document into a DOM, and perform manipulations on that.
Pseudocode that should map closely to XML::DOM:
document = //load document
divs = document.getElementsByTagName("div");
for(div in divs) {
if(div.getAttributes["class"] == "footer") {
parent = div.getParent();
for(child in div.getChildren()) {
// filter attribute types?
parent.insertBefore(div, child);
}
parent.removeChild(div);
}
}
Here is a perl library, HTML::DOM, and another, XML::DOM
.NET has built-in libraries to handle dom parsing.
In Perl you need the /s modifier, otherwise the dot won't match a newline.
That said, using a proper HTML or XML parser to remove unwanted parts of a HTML file is much more appropriate.
<div[^>]*class="footer"[^>]*>(.*?)</div>
Worked for me, but needed to use backslashes before special characters
<div[^>]*class=\"footer\"[^>]*>(.*?)<\/div>
Partly depends on the exact regex engine you are using - which language etc. But one possibility is that you need to escape the quotes and/or the forward slash. You might also want to make it case insensitive.
<div class=\"footer\".*?>(.*?)<\/div>
Otherwise please say what language/platform you are using - .NET, java, perl ...
Try this:
<([^\s]+).*?class="footer".*?>([.\n]*?)</([^\s]+)>
Your biggest problem is going to be nested tags. For example:
<div class="footer"><b></b></div>
The regexp given would match everything through the </b>, leaving the </div> dangling on the end. You will have to either assume that the tag you're looking for has no nested elements, or you will need to use some sort of parser from HTML to DOM and an XPath query to remove an entire sub-tree.
This will be tricky because of the greediness of regular expressions, (Note that my examples may be specific to perl, but I know that greediness is a general issue with REs.) The second .*? will match as much as possible before the </div>, so if you have the following:
<div class="SomethingElse"><div class="footer"> stuff </div></div>
The expression will match:
<div class="footer"> stuff </div></div>
which is not likely what you want.
why not <div class="footer".*?</div> I'm not a regex guru either, but I don't think you need to specify that last bracket for your open div tag
I am using HtmlAgilityPack. I create an HtmlDocument and LoadHtml with the following string:
<select id="foo_Bar" name="foo.Bar"><option selected="selected" value="1">One</option><option value="2">Two</option></select>
This does some unexpected things. First, it gives two parser errors, EndTagNotRequired. Second, the select node has 4 children - two for the option tags and two more for the inner text of the option tags. Last, the OuterHtml is like this:
<select id="foo_Bar" name="foo.Bar"><option selected="selected" value="1">One<option value="2">Two</select>
So basically it is deciding for me to drop the closing tags on the options. Let's leave aside for a moment whether it is proper and desirable to do that. I am using HtmlAgilityPack to test HTML generation code, so I don't want it to make any decision for me or give any errors unless the HTML is truly malformed. Is there some way to make it behave how I want? I tried setting some of the options for HtmlDocument, specifically:
doc.OptionAutoCloseOnEnd = false;
doc.OptionCheckSyntax = false;
doc.OptionFixNestedTags = false;
This is not working. If HtmlAgilityPack cannot do what I want, can you recommend something that can?
The exact same error is reported on the HAP home page's discussion, but it looks like no meaningful fixes have been made to the project in a few years. Not encouraging.
A quick browse of the source suggests the error might be fixable by commenting out line 92 of HtmlNode.cs:
// they sometimes contain, and sometimes they don 't...
ElementsFlags.Add("option", HtmlElementFlag.Empty);
(Actually no, they always contain label text, although a blank string would also be valid text. A careless author might omit the end-tag, but then that's true of any element.)
ADD
An equivalent solution is calling HtmlNode.ElementsFlags.Remove("option"); before any use of liberary (without need to modify the liberary source code)
It seems that there is some reason not to parse the Option tag as a "generic" tag, for XHTML compliance, however this can be a real pain in the neck.
My suggestion is to do a whole-string-replace and change all "option" tags to "my_option" tags, that way you:
Don't have to modify the source of the library (and can upgrade it later).
Can parse as you usually would.
The original post on HtmlAgilityPack forum can be found at:
http://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=14982
C#: What is a good Regex to parse hyperlinks and their description?
Please consider case insensitivity, white-space and use of single quotes (instead of double quotes) around the HREF tag.
Please also consider obtaining hyperlinks which have other tags within the <a> tags such as <b> and <i>.
As long as there are no nested tags (and no line breaks), the following variant works well:
<a\s+href=(?:"([^"]+)"|'([^']+)').*?>(.*?)</a>
As soon as nested tags come into play, regular expressions are unfit for parsing. However, you can still use them by applying more advanced features of modern interpreters (depending on your regex machine). E.g. .NET regular expressions use a stack; I found this:
(?:<a.*?href=[""'](?<url>.*?)[""'].*?>)(?<name>(?><a[^<]*>(?<DEPTH>)|</a>(?<-DEPTH>)|.)+)(?(DEPTH)(?!))(?:</a>)
Source: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottcate/archive/2004/12/13/281955.aspx
See this example from StackOverflow: Regular expression for parsing links from a webpage?
Using The HTML Agility Pack you can parse the html, and extract details using the semantics of the HTML, instead of a broken regex.
I found this but apparently these guys had some problems with it.
Edit: (It works!)
I have now done my own testing and found that it works, I don't know C# so I can't give you a C# answer but I do know PHP and here's the matches array I got back from running it on this:
Text
array(3) { [0]=> string(52) "Text" [1]=> string(15) "pages/index.php" [2]=> string(4) "Text" }
I have a regex that handles most cases, though I believe it does match HTML within a multiline comment.
It's written using the .NET syntax, but should be easily translatable.
Just going to throw this snippet out there now that I have it working..this is a less greedy version of one suggested earlier. The original wouldnt work if the input had multiple hyperlinks. This code below will allow you to loop through all the hyperlinks:
static Regex rHref = new Regex(#"<a.*?href=[""'](?<url>[^""^']+[.]*?)[""'].*?>(?<keywords>[^<]+[.]*?)</a>", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Compiled);
public void ParseHyperlinks(string html)
{
MatchCollection mcHref = rHref.Matches(html);
foreach (Match m in mcHref)
AddKeywordLink(m.Groups["keywords"].Value, m.Groups["url"].Value);
}
Here is a regular expression that will match the balanced tags.
(?:""'[""'].*?>)(?(?>(?)|(?<-DEPTH>)|.)+)(?(DEPTH)(?!))(?:)