CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlcsscharacter-encodingspecial-characters
Atadj
Atadj

Reputation: 7210

Is there a HTML/CSS way to display HTML tags without parsing?

Is there any way that I could display HTML tags without parsing? Tags like XMP worked before perfectly but now it's replaced with PRE that isn't so cool. Take a look at this example:

//This used to NOT PARSE HTML even if you used standard < and >.
<XMP>
<a hred="http://example.com">Link</a>
</XMP>

//New PRE tag requires &lt; and &gt; as replacement for < and >.
<PRE>
&#60;a href="http://example.com"&#62;Link&#60;/A&#62;
</PRE>

What I'm looking for is equivalent of old XMP tag. New PRE tag will parse code.

Upvotes: 28

Views: 38959

Answers (9)

Sean Cassiere
Sean Cassiere

Reputation: 61

I personally think using the <code> </code> tags only works in Dream Weaver and the tag <xmp> </xmp> never stopped working unless you put in </xmp> it works fine. Using <textarea> </textarea> makes it so that others can edit your code on the website or the page so I recommend that the tag <xmp> </xmp> is still used and that that tag still lives on.

Upvotes: 6

morissette
morissette

Reputation: 1109

And then... a few years go by, I have the same problem while converting my blog from wordpress to a vuejs spa backed by lambda and dynamodb.

And the answer is; at least in my situation. Escape the entity.

&lt; becomes &amp;lt;

&gt; becomes &amp;gt;

etc. etc.

Hope this helps.

Upvotes: 2

Jukka K. Korpela
Jukka K. Korpela

Reputation: 201886

You can use a script element with its type set to denote plain text, and set its display property to block. This only affects the parsing behavior: no markup (tags or entity or character references) is recognized, except for the end tag of the element itself </script>. (So it is not quite the same as xmp, where the recognized tag is </xmp>.) You can separately make white space handling similar to that of xmp and pre and/or set the font the monospace as in those elements by default.

Example:

<style>
    script {
        display: block;
    }
</style>

Then within document body:

<script type="text/plain">
    <i>&eacute;</i>
</script>

Tested on newest versions of IE, Chrome, Firefox, Opera. Didn’t work in IE 8 and IE 7 emulation on IE 9, but that’s probably a bug in the emulation.

However, I don’t see why you would use this instead of xmp, which hasn’t stopped working. It’s not in the specs, but if you are worried about that, you should have always been worried. Mentioned in HTML 2.0 (the first HTML spec ever) as avoidable, it was deprecated in HTML 3.2 and completely removed in HTML 4.0 (long ago: in 1997).

The xmp is making a comeback rather than dying. The W3C HTML5 (characterized as the current HTML specification by W3C staff) declares xmp as obsolete and non-conforming, but it also imposes a requirement on browsers: “User agents must treat xmp elements in a manner equivalent to pre elements in terms of semantics and for purposes of rendering. (The parser has special behavior for this element though.)” The old parsing behavior is thus not explicitly required, but clearly implied.

Upvotes: 34

knomologs
knomologs

Reputation: 73

The modern way is to use textarea with (boolean) attribute readonly. You could use XMP, but that is deprecated, so it may eventually stop being supported.
example:

<textarea readonly='true'>
    <p>This is some text</p>
</textarea>

Upvotes: 7

Peter Korinek TellusTalk
Peter Korinek TellusTalk

Reputation: 257

I suggest using the html iframe tag and put the text you like to display in the src attribute. you only have to url or base64 encode it first.

example (urlencoded):
<iframe src="data:text/plain,%22%3Chello%3E%22"></iframe>

example (base64):
<iframe src="data:text/plain;base64,IjxoZWxsbz4i"></iframe>

Result displayed as:
"<hello>"

Upvotes: 0

tjhorner
tjhorner

Reputation: 348

If you want to be more complex, another way is to create a custom tag using jQuery. For this example, I used <noparse>.

$('noparse').each(function(){
    if($(this).attr('tagchecked') != 'true'){ //checks if already changed tag
        $(this).text($(this).html()).attr('tagchecked', 'true'); //makes the html into plaintext
    }
});

JSFiddle here

Upvotes: 1

Erik Funkenbusch
Erik Funkenbusch

Reputation: 93474

Well, one way would be to use jQuery. the jQuery .text() method will encode special characters. And the original un-encoded text will remain if you view source.

<div id="text">
    <a href="">This is an anchor</a>
</div>

<script>
    var t = $('#text'); t.html(t.text());
</script>

Upvotes: -1

Quentin
Quentin

Reputation: 944498

There isn't.

In theory you could use a CDATA block, but no browser supports that in text/html mode.

Use character references.

Upvotes: 1

Niet the Dark Absol
Niet the Dark Absol

Reputation: 324810

Technically you could use <textarea>, but it would require that there be no </textarea> tag in the code you are trying to show. It'd just easier to escape the <.

Upvotes: -1

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