Re: Some comments on HTML tidy

* Reece Dunn wrote:
>I am using HTML tidy as a HTML parser that feeds into a text outputter to do 
>HTML ==> text conversion. This is a great tool, but here are a few things I 
>have noticed and have modified:
>
>[1]  in the C++ binding (tidyx.h), IsHeader() is missing a return statement:
>-    Bool IsHeader()      { tidyNodeIsHeader( tnod() ); } /* h1, h2, ... */
>+    Bool IsHeader()      { return tidyNodeIsHeader( tnod() ); } /* h1, h2, 
>... */
>
>[2]  the C++ binding functions should be const qualified, e.g.
>
>    Bool IsHTML() const       { return tidyNodeIsHTML( tnod() ); }

(There are several C++ bindings and they are not part of the sf.net
projects, if the author does not read this list, I would suggest to
send the feedback directly to the author).

>[4]  normally, any extended character (e.g. &emdash;) is outputted in its 
>escaped form when you specify an output encoding. For my application, I want 
>to prevent the escaping of these characters. As such, I have added a 
>TidyNoCharEscaping option to disable character escaping.

The default output encoding is US-ASCII so Tidy has to escape those;
if you specify UTF-8 as output encoding, Tidy won't use character
references for characters other than &'"<> and maybe U+00A0.

>[5] HTML tidy doesn't appear to have any auto detection of the character 
>encoding being used (except for the UTF BOM). That is, any <meta> tag that 
>specifies the text encoding. Is there an easy way that I can do this?

Well, you would have to assume some character encoding, parse the
document until you find a <meta>, if that's a different encoding go
back to step 1 assuming the specified character encoding and parse the
document again, this time without looking for <meta>. You would need
additional logic for <?xml?>-style encoding declarations. There is a
little bit of code for this, but adding it to Tidy would require some
work still. Patches very much appreciated, you might want to have a look
at my HTML::Encoding Perl module on CPAN.

>[6] I am having problems getting the <win32tc.h> logic 
>(TIDY_WIN32_MLANG_SUPPORT) working. It is producing an access violation that 
>I have not (yet) been able to track down - it appears to be happening 
>somewhere in ole32.dll.

This is highly experimental and there might be problems compiling this
as C++ (just guessing, it uses the C-ish way for COM stuff in any case).
That said, when I looked at the code last time, it worked for me.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:[email protected] · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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