Thread

Greetings all,

When “Default Text Formatting for This Field” for a channel field is set to “None”, special characters will not be converted to their respective HTML entities. This seems to be OK for ampersands and quotes since I’m using UTF-8 character encoding for my pages.

However, it does not work for other characters such as ‘<’ and ‘>’. The result is when these are entered into a custom field with text formatting set to None, invalid HTML will be generated. I’m wondering if there is a way in EE to turn on conversion of characters to their HTML entities when using “None” for text formatting.

Otherwise, I’m looking for any suggestions on the best way to handle this. The goal is to make it OK for clients to input whatever they want into a simple text field that will be used for titles of sections on a page. It makes sense for these titles to be formatted with “None” since they will be simply wrapped in an <h3></h3>.

I’m using EE v2.2.1 - Build: date 20110630.

Thanks,

-NorthK

Hi, NorthK.

Possibly one of the available Find and Replace plugins? Untested, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind.

Hi Sue,

It appears that there are a couple of plug-ins that handle text conversion to HTML entities. However, I wanted to first make sure that there isn’t a built-in way to do this in EE—can you confirm that please?

It seems like this would be a very common use case—I think it would be desirable any time a design includes something like

<h2>{data-item-here}</h2>

where you would use text formatting of type “None” so it doesn’t get paragraph tags stuck in.

For anyone reading this later, the plug-ins I found are:
http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/eencode/ (this one appears to be written for EE2.x)
http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/xml-encode/ (written by Rick Ellis himself, but it’s unclear if it works on EE2.x).

Thanks,
-NorthK

Hi NorthK,

A plugin would be appropriate in this case, though I think that’d make a good feature request. Thanks for the feedback!