Stripping html tags (was Re: Problem with revExecuteSQL - More)

Fri Nov 2 13:46:28 EDT 2007

Andre Garzia wrote:
> doesn't that function makes you loose markup that is not displayed by
> rev implementation of htmltext. For example, if you have <DIV> tag
> that is not understood by htmltext, do you still get its content when
> querying the text of the field?

Good question.

I just opened up my tester stack, which has a field containing styled 
text which is used as the source htmlText.  Right after I put the 
htmlText of that field into a var named tData, I added this line:

    put "<div>Some DIV data</div>"&cr before tData

Both my and Jim's stripper functions return the same result, which 
includes in the first line:

    Some DIV data

There may be other tags which don't work well, and I'd be interested if 
we could find specific examples.  But IIRC, for tags Rev doesn't 
interpret when setting htmlText, it doesn't display the tag but does 
display the content.

This has been a long-standing annoyance with the engine among some 
people, because it renders the content of elements like <head> which are 
not normally seen in a browser but would be seen in a Rev field.

But if the rule is indeed "When in doubt, leave it in" it would seem 
more beneficial for the greatest number of uses, since it's easy enough 
to strip any specific unwanted elements.

This discussion had me wondering, "What does Rev do about comments?", so 
I added this line and ran my test again:

    put "<!-- Some comment data -->"&cr before tData

Interestingly, it seems comments are removed when rendered as htmlText, 
which seems appropriate for most uses.

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  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
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