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morbac
Convert selection XML to text (<> => <&>)
When i convert text to XML by using the Convert selection XML to text (<> => <&>) it seems to not do anything for the apostrophe (single quote) even if that should be '
<
>
&
'
"
Btw, is this really correct?
When i want to convert text to XML i need to use Convert selection XML to text and not Convert selection text to XML. The (<> => <&>) seems to be correct, though.
I tried with v. 3.0.4.3 and it works for me with &, though I would expect a slightly different behavior
Expected behaviour:
Function to de-/encode special chars within selected tags (which are not marked as CDATA):
chars are replaced with ' " & < > and vice versa
It also encodes tags though if selected, so I would expect it to encode only the content of a tag (Use Case: Usually I would like to select whole parts of a file and then "encode" content of all non-cdata tags)
The de/encode is a simple text replacement algo. It has no notion of XML itself other than that it has to replace certain texts.
Lets explore the use cases:
Use case 1: I have text, which I need to insert into XML.. however it might have illegal/reserved characters that will mess up the XML format. Hence, I select the text that I inserted and run 'Convert selection XML to text'... now my text is valid XML text.
Use case 2: I have some text node in XML that is encoded. Without using a full XML parser, I select this text and then run 'Convert selection text to XML. Now my selection is regular text and I can copy/paste it somewhere.
Use case 3: I copy/pasted some & encoded text which was part of a cookie/URL-query/etc and want to decode it to XML. I select all and run 'Convert selection text to XML'. I will now have an XML document that I can work with.
Neither of these use cases require CDATA knowledge. Can you maybe describe your use case in detail?
As described in a Python article dedicated to XML escaping [1], there are two separate cases to consider when escaping: CDATA and attributes. In the former case, there's no need to handle quotes; in the latter, quotes should be treated.
It seems logical to have dedicated functions here for the two cases; or maybe be smart to check the context (but then it would be not very flexible for cases where context in not clear, as in a temporary file without proper XML structure used for intermediate work). Currently (in version 3.0.4.3) the function Escape characters in selection (<> → <>) escapes everything including quotes in all positions.
[1] https://wiki.python.org/moin/EscapingXml
For information, the xmltools options dialog let you choose which character must be handled by text/xml conversion functions:
