Dentity
A Lightweight Decoder and Encoder for HTML Entities
Dentity is a small library for encoding and decoding HTML entities. It covers all the W3C defined entities, supports strict and non-strict conversions, and can work both in browser and node environments, which means that it doesn't use DOMParser or similar methods. It is fast and also small. The minified version is only around 31KB, and smaller than 14KB when gzipped. It is also well tested.
Installation
The latest source code of Dentity can be found at https://github.com/arashkazemi/dentity
To use in other node projects, install Dentity from npm public repository:
npm install dentity
and then import it using
const Dentity = require("dentity");
To use in a webpage, download the source code and extract it. The minified
script itself is available in the /dist
directory.
It is also available via unpkg CDN and can be included in HTML files using
<script src="https://unpkg.com/dentity/dist/dentity.min.js"></script>
Usage
There are two main functions in Dentity:
encode(str)
and
decode(str, is_strict=false, convert_nbsp_to_sp=false)
To encode a string, use the encode
function:
Dentity.encode("hello > < ≠");
which results in
"hello > < ≠"
and similarly you can use decode
function to do the reverse transform:
Dentity.decode("hello > < ≠");
which will give "hello > < ≠"
back.
The decode
function takes a second argument is_strict
which if true
causes
the function to only accept W3C valid encodings and doesn't accept the exceptions
like ©
(without the semicolon at the end). Its default value is false
.
The last argument of the decode
function is convert_nbsp_to_sp
. By
definition,
and its equivalents are decoded to code 160 which means a
non-breaking space, but in a text what we normally expect from a space is code
32 which is breakable and code 160 may lead to unforeseen results. As a workaround
for this, Dentity offers a way to convert
to code 32 instead of code 160.
You can enable this by setting convert_nbsp_to_sp
to true
. As stated, its default
value is false
.
A helper function registerPrototypeFunctions
is also available, that would register
both functions on String.prototype as encodeHTML
and decodeHTML
so the above
examples can be done like:
"hello > < ≠".encodeHTML()
and
"hello > < ≠".decodeHTML()
which can be very helpful in most situations, but this is not the default behavior because of the possibility of unwanted consequences like name collisions. So one should call
Dentity.registerPrototypeFunctions();
once after importing Dentity in order to use them.
Copyright (C) 2023 Arash Kazemi contact.arash.kazemi@gmail.com. All rights reserved.
Dentity project is subject to the terms of BSD-2-Clause License. See the LICENSE
file for more details.