Re: generating an html intro text ...

Jochem Maas wrote:

Stut wrote:

I'm sure Tidy could be employed to do this job. Grab your target length of text, backtrack until you find < or >. If it's a < then chop that bit off. Then give it to Tidy to fix the HTML. That should close off any open tags and give you a properly formed snippet. Or you could implement the same functionality yourself quite easily, and it doesn't need to be well-formed HTML but you would need to check for tags that don't need closing (img, br, etc).

Stut, I going to go out on a limb and say 'bullshit' to those comments, no personal offence meant (I mostly value your input *alot*, but I guess we can't agree all the time):

None taken, but I think you're making this into a bigger problem than it is.

1. simply backtracking to a '<' or '>' doesn't account for unescaped output within the content pieces/parts of the html, e.g.: <P>look this here character '<' ammounts to invalid html<p>

If the content is not escaped then it's not going to get displayed properly by the browser, so why worry about it?

2. backtracking in the manner you describe does account for a large ammount of hmtl at the beginning of the string - remember that the aim of the game is to truncate the user visible content of the html string in question (the comment below would be required to be part of the output - think html comment spam, which is quite effective and some clients state as a requirement): <!-- imagine this comment is 1000s of chars long --><P>look at this</P>

Comments are easily removed before snippet generation with a simple regex.

you say 'you could implement the same functionality yourself quite easily' - if that was true then why does nobody have a readymade solution - it's not as if the requirement is 'way out there' as far as web development goes. I don't think creating routines for doing advanced manipulation of XML/HTML strings 'properly' is something very simple, something that can be atested to by the relative complexity of libtidy and libxml2. I not looking for a hack job here, I need something that can be relied on to output html strings that will not break the validity (& layout) of a page regardless of the quality of input. the more I think about it the more I inclined to think that Tidy is about to become a close friend. :-)

If I were you I would definitely be looking at Tidy because it's been well tested in the real world and will save a huge amount of effort. However, I don't think writing code to do this amounts to a hack. The rules of markup are very clear and with a little thought you could easily handle the vast majority of possible situations. The most hack-like way would be to purely ensure that you don't break in the middle of an actual tag (whether it be an opening or closing tag), and then wrap it in another tag and let the browser take care of closing unclosed tags. -Stut -- http://stut.net/