stringify-entities

What is stringify-entities?

The stringify-entities npm package is used for encoding special characters into HTML or XML entities. It is particularly useful when you need to ensure that text content is safely and correctly represented in HTML or XML documents, preventing issues related to unescaped characters.

What are stringify-entities's main functionalities?

Encode special characters in HTML

This feature allows you to convert characters that have special meaning in HTML into their corresponding HTML entities, thus preventing them from being interpreted as HTML code. This is useful for displaying plain text in web pages.

const stringify = require('stringify-entities');

const text = 'This & that';
const encodedText = stringify(text);
console.log(encodedText); // 'This & that'

Encode special characters in XML

This feature enables the encoding of characters into XML entities. By specifying options, you can control which characters to encode and whether to escape only those characters, making it flexible for different XML contexts.

const stringify = require('stringify-entities');

const text = 'AT&T';
const options = {subset: ['&'], escapeOnly: true};
const encodedText = stringify(text, options);
console.log(encodedText); // 'AT&T'

Other packages similar to stringify-entities

he

The 'he' package is another popular HTML entity encoder and decoder. It supports all HTML5 entities and provides robust decoding capabilities, which makes it more comprehensive in handling HTML entities compared to stringify-entities, which focuses primarily on stringifying.

entities

Similar to 'stringify-entities', the 'entities' package offers encoding and decoding of HTML/XML entities. It provides a more extensive set of functionalities including decoding, which is not a focus of stringify-entities. This makes 'entities' a more versatile choice for projects that require both encoding and decoding capabilities.

README

stringify-entities

Encode HTML character references and character entities.

• Very fast
• Just the encoding part
• Reliable: '`' characters are escaped to ensure no scripts run in IE6-8. Additionally, only named entities recognised by HTML4 are encoded, meaning the infamous ' (which people think is a virus) won’t show up

Algorithm

By default, all dangerous, non-ASCII, or non-printable ASCII characters are encoded. A subset of characters can be given to encode just those characters. Alternatively, pass escapeOnly to escape just the dangerous characters (", ', <, >, &, `). By default, numeric entities are used. Pass useNamedReferences to use named entities when possible, or useShortestReferences to use them if that results in less bytes.

Installation

npm:

npm install stringify-entities

Usage

var stringify = require('stringify-entities')

stringify('alpha © bravo ≠ charlie 𝌆 delta')
// => 'alpha © bravo ≠ charlie 𝌆 delta'

stringify('alpha © bravo ≠ charlie 𝌆 delta', {useNamedReferences: true})
// => 'alpha © bravo ≠ charlie 𝌆 delta'

API

stringifyEntities(value[, options])

Encode special characters in value.

options

options.escapeOnly

Whether to only escape possibly dangerous characters (boolean, default: false). Those characters are ", ', <, > &, and `.

options.subset

Whether to only escape the given subset of characters (Array.<string>).

options.useNamedReferences

Whether to use named entities where possible (boolean?, default: false).

options.useShortestReferences

Whether to use named entities, where possible, if that results in less bytes (boolean?, default: false). Note: useNamedReferences can be omitted when using useShortestReferences.

options.omitOptionalSemicolons

Whether to omit semi-colons when possible (boolean?, default: false). Note: This creates parse errors: don’t use this except when building a minifier.

Omitting semi-colons is possible for certain legacy named references, and numeric entities, in some cases.

options.attribute

Only needed when operating dangerously with omitOptionalSemicolons: true. Create entities which don’t fail in attributes (boolean?, default: false).

Related

• parse-entities — Parse HTML character references
• character-entities — Info on character entities
• character-entities-html4 — Info on HTML4 character entities
• character-entities-legacy — Info on legacy character entities
• character-reference-invalid — Info on invalid numeric character references

License

MIT © Titus Wormer