Handling special characters in Templating

Hi,

This is regarding converting special characters to character or numeric entities in templating.
When a user enters special characters like &, <, >, Registered, Trademark symbol in non VFE fields and saves the DCR, the ampersand, less than, greater than symbols are converted to character entities &. <, > but the other symbols like registered, trademark etc remain as entered by the user.
Need some help on how to convert all special and extended characters to character entity. Does this need be handled in the DCT , DTD or TPL.
The application is on TeamSite 5.5.2L, Templating 5.5.2L, AIX 5.5.1

Edited by Monil on 05/05/04 12:01 PM (server time).

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Migrateduser

Monil,

It depends on where you want the translated characters. If you need them to be in their translated for within the DCR, then you'll need to figure out a way to do the conversion in the DCT (probably using FormAPI). If you only need them translated in the generated file, then doing the conversion in the TPL would definately be the way to go.

- Jason

Monil

Thanks for the reply.

I am looking at having the translated characters in the DCR.

LooseCannon

What are you trying to achieve by converting the characters to their entity name equivalent?

Monil

To make the generated HTML file , XHTML complaint

Migrateduser

Then why do you need the characters translated in the DCR? If you're just generating XHTML, you should be able to much more easily translate the characters in the TPL.

- Jason

Monil

Do individual characters need to be translated in the TPL or can I pass the DCR output to the TPL and all the characters will be translated? Could you suggest a method to do so.
I am trying to achieve this for non xml content also which dont employ any TPLs. So for nonxml content, I will have to handle it in the DCT.

Edited by Monil on 05/05/04 12:49 PM (server time).

Migrateduser

Not sure what you mean by individual characters, but here's an example of some character conversions I've done:

my $tmpPWSubj = iwpt_dcr_value("dcr.PWSubject");
$tmpPWSubj =~ s#\"#"#g;
$tmpPWSubj =~ s#\'#'#g;

You can also make your character conversions into a function so that you just have the code once and pass the variables into it. I'd suggest doing this if you have a lot of characters to convert/translate.

- Jason

Monil

Thanks Jason.

By individual characters, I meant each special character &, <, >, ", ' etc .

LooseCannon

The five characters you have listed are the only invalid characters. The templating engine converts these when saving the DCR... therefore you don't need to!

Monil

Yes, I had mentioned in my original post that these 5 are getting converted. Problem is with other characters like registered, trademark etc which are not getting converted.

LooseCannon

What I'm saying is to be XHTML compliant you don't need to convert any other character's.

Sri

Hi,

The characters &, <, > are converted automatically to their entity equivalents by xml parser that writes out DCRs. Other characters such as Trademark, Copyright are not converted to entity representations because they are not illegal in xml. If I understand your problem correctly, I think you want to convert all non-ascii characters to their entity representations.

Look at http:// http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/dtd_module_defs.html#a_xhtml_character_entities. All of these can be valid in XHTML and there are many possibilities. It is probably not a good idea to logic to check for each of these characters and converting them.

I think a better approach is to make sure the resulting [xhtml] page is in proper encoding through the use of META tags in the presentation template. Having this encoding makes the browser use proper glyphs to display the special characters. In otherwords, you don't need to convert special characters to entities to make a valid XHTML. ALl you need is correct declaration of which encoding that page is in.

Hope this helps,
Sri

Monil

Thanks Sri.

Our corporate webmaster requires to translate all special characters into character or numeric entities in the resulting XHTML page to meet XHTML complaince standards.

Monil

Valentine

I believe tidy can do a character -> entity translation.

$ tidy -asxhtml -m *.html

http://tidy.sourceforge.net/