htmlsplit

htmlsplit

htmlsplit splits HTML documents into lines that hopefully reflect the intent of the author.

Introduction

A web page may have the following layout:

Term Starts: Wednesday 7 January 2015
Term Ends: Friday 27 March 2015

However, there is a wide range of markup that could achieve this layout. For example, we could have a <div> that contains lines with <br> tags:

<div>
  Term Starts: Wednesday 7 January 2015<br>
  Term Ends: Friday 27 March 2015<br>
</div>

Alternatively, each line could be its own <div>:

<div>Term Starts: Wednesday 7 January 2015</div>
<div>Term Ends: Friday 27 March 2015</div>

a line in a list:

<ul>
  <li>Term Starts: Wednesday 7 January 2015</li>
  <li>Term Ends: Friday 27 March 2015</li>
</ul>

or a row in a <table>:

<table>
  <tr><td>Term Starts: Wednesday 7 January 2015</td></tr>
  <tr><td>Term Ends: Friday 27 March 2015</td></tr>
</table>

And of course when using tables, each row could itself be split into columns:

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>Term Starts:</td>
    <td>Wednesday 7 January 2015</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Term Ends:</td>
    <td>Friday 27 March 2015</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Authors could also mark up different parts of each line with flow tags:

<b>Term Starts:</b> Wednesday 7 January 2015<br>
<b>Term Ends:</b> Friday 27 March 2015<br>

The key point is that whitespace in the markup does not give us any clues as to the intent of the page author. For example, whether the table example above has each table cell marked up a seperate line, or has each row (and all its cells) on the same line, makes no difference to how the markup is rendered.

The purpose of htmlsplit therefore is to try to capture this intent, when splitting an HTML document into lines for processing.

Usage

The module provides a single function, which does the splitting:

var htmlSplit = require('htmlsplit');

The function takes a string as input, and returns an array of lines

htmlSplit(
  [
    '<div>Term Starts: Wednesday 7 January 2015</div>',
    '<!-- This should not get through -->',
    '<div>Term Ends: Friday 27 March 2015</div>'
  ].join('')
).should.eql([
  'Term Starts: Wednesday 7 January 2015',
  'Term Ends: Friday 27 March 2015'
]);

The function can also take a second parameter which if true will add debug information to the output.

Changelog

2015-03-05 (v1.0.0)

Initial release.