Allow Non HTML tags

[MohanVijayakumar]

Hi,

I have the string like below in my input
The diameter starts <MM 78 > radial
In the above string i get only The diameter starts. Is there anyway to get the string as full as it does not contain any HTML tags

Thanks

[mganss]

The HTML parser parses the input as The diameter starts <mm 78=""> radial</mm>, then strips the mm element. If there was a space before the mm, i.e. < mm, you'd get The diameter starts < MM 78 > radial.

I currently see no elegant way out of this dilemma. You could pre-process your input by inserting a zero width space (​) after every < which is not followed by what you consider a HTML tag name or slash.

[mganss]

I came across this problem myself recently so I hacked up a gist.

A few things to note:

• The HTML elements recognized are a combination of HTML 4 and HTML 5.
• Tags are matched with a regex which may fail if you've got < within attributes (although I'm not sure this is really a problem in this particular case since we're only replacing < with <).
• When a "non-HTML" element is encountered, the < is replaced by < which causes the sanitizer to not recognize it as an HTML element. I think that's less hacky than the approach I suggested above.
• Obviously this will not take care of cases where the input contains actual HTML elements which are not intended to be recognized as such.