Can I pull XHTML-formatted weblog entry fields into a template as plain text? I want no HTML, no entities, etc.

For example, let’s say I allow XHMTL formatting of the {title} field, and now I want to use it in the page header in the <title> </title> tag. How do I strip out all HTML and entities? I don’t want to disable XHMTL formatting in the underlying filed, just in this particular display of its contents.

The HTML_Stripper plugin gets me halfway there—it removes HTML and, optionally, both < and > characters, but I’m still stuck with ampersands, non-breaking spaces, etc. The Find and Replace plugin could do it, too, if I felt like listing every possible HTML tag and entity in every usage of the plugin, but I’d rather not be updating my templates every time a user discovers a new tag or entity.

You would be much better to do this the other way: enter the content with no formatting, and use a plugin around the content in the template to add formatting.

That makes sense assuming I want to format the whole field, but what I’m trying to solve is much more a per-instance problem. Sometimes I want to underline a word, or use a non-breaking space, in my title field. I can’t think of how to do that efficiently at run-time.

Have you looked at other plugins, like TruncHTML? You might be best to expand a plugin to cover the scenarios you need.  In any case, I’m going to move this up to the how to forum. =)

Thanks for the pointer, and for moving the post. I’m often unsure of the difference between tech support and “how to” questions.

I’ve read all of the “Text Formatting” and “Output Text” plugins, and none seem to convert or remove entities (like curly quotes) into plain text. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I use the Find and Replace plugin to strip html tags and newline sequences from the summary field, in order to use it in the meta description tag. I don’t replace any html entities or other special character because they all seem to work fine in the meta description tag.

To simply delete any html entities you should search for an amersand/semicolon sequence. I haven’t tested it, but I assume that changing the “find” string to

would work fine. Converting html entities requires a lot more work, and also requires that you nest the plugin (I believe plugins are called innermost first, aren’t they?)

I’ve been using this combination successfully to remove both entities and html code:

By the way, RegexBuddy is a fantastic tool for creating and testing regular expressions. I highly recommend it.