Geany XML encode plugin

What is it?

Geany XML encode plugin is a plugin for Geany that adds new menu commands to convert XML special characters (“&”, “<”, “>”, “'” and “"”) in a section, or the whole document, into XML character entities.

Latest version

The latest release can be downloaded from the github project downloads page.

Documentation

Once the plugin is installed, it may be activated by the Geany plugin manager. Select Tools->Plugin Manager from the main menu, and you should see the “XML Encode” plugin. Select it to activate it, then restart Geany.

Once the plugin is active, there will be a new item in the Geany Tools menu, called “Encode XML special characters” whenever there is a document open in Geany. This item wil lead to a submenu with two options: “Document” and “Selection”.

Both options do the same thing, but the first works on the whole document, while the second only applies to the current selection (if there is no selection, nothing is done). Depending on the option, all of the special XML characters in the document or selection will be converted to XML entity references.

The special XML characters are “&”, “<”, “>”, “'” and “"”. These characters have special meaning in XML syntax, and there are several places they cannot be used in text data without causing problems. By converting them to entity references - “&”, “<”, “>”, “'” and “"” respectively - these problems can be avoided.

This plugin does that conversion automatically, so that the selection or document converted can be embedded as text data in an XML file without problems. This is especially useful for embedding source code in (X)HTML files.

Installation

Normally, the package may be built and installed with the following sequence of commands:

• ./configure

• make

• make install

If installation requires root privileges, then it may necessary to change the last command to “sudo make install”, or to first request root privileges with “su”, then run “make install”.

This sequence of commands will normally build the plugin and install it in the default location for Geany plugins. All that should be necessary then is to restart Geany, and the plugin should be available in the plugin manager.

If Geany is in a non-standard location, it may be necessary to run the configure script with the “--with-geany-libdir” option. For example:

• ./configure --with-geany-libdir=/path/to/geany/libdir

After that, the regular “make” and “make install” commands should build the plugin and install it in the desired location.

In some cases, it may be required to run the “autogen.sh” script first. This should normally only be run by developers to prepare the project for the end user.

For more details, please see the file called “INSTALL”.

Development information

Why isn't this part of the geany-plugins project?

I doubt they would be interested in such a trivial plugin. More likely than not, there's already something in the standard Geany UI, or the default plugins, or in the geany-plugins, that does this. I just haven't been able to find it, and this took all of two afternoons to put together, so... yeah.

But if there is nothing like it in the existing plugins or the standard Geany functions, and if enough people think this is worth including, then I'd be happy to port it over.

Why Autotools?

Geany itself uses Autotools, as does the geany-plugins project.

Why C?

The plugin's functions are so simple, there was simply no need for the power of C++.

Known issues and potential improvements

• XML _de_code?

• Currently the characters and entities are hardcoded in the source. Instead of that, they could be stored in the Geany configuration file, so that users have the option of changing the conversion behaviour. (For example, if they don't want “'” converted to “'”.)

• Especially if the above is implemented, perhaps the conversion options could be set in a configure dialog.

• A help dialog could be implemented, even if all it does is give more info about the plugin.

• Currently the conversion only works on single characters - and that means single-byte UTF-8 characters. For more generic replacements, perhaps the code could be redesigned to handle replacing strings. However, that's not a trivial change, and there are a lot of issues to take into account, like precedence (for example, if you want to replace “x” with one thing and “xx” with another, you'd have to give the latter higher precendence, or it will be treated as two “x”s rather than “xx”).

• Rather than just an XML entity encoder, perhaps a more generalized transformation plugin might be handy, with XML encoding being just one of a number of specialized transformations. But what other transformations might there be?

Licensing

Please see the file called COPYING.

Contacts

For contact information, check out the github project page.