Dentity

A Lightweight Decoder and Encoder for HTML Entities

Dentity is a small library for encoding and decoding HTML entities. It covers all the W3C defined entities, supports strict and non-strict conversions, and can work both in browser and node environments, which means that it doesn't use DOMParser or similar methods. It is fast and also small. The minified version is only around 31KB, and smaller than 14KB when gzipped. It is also well tested.

Installation

The latest source code of Dentity can be found at https://github.com/arashkazemi/dentity

To use in other node projects, install Dentity from npm public repository:

    npm install dentity  

and then import it using

    const Dentity = require("dentity");

To use in a webpage, download the source code and extract it. The minified script itself is available in the /dist directory.

It is also available via unpkg CDN and can be included in HTML files using

    <script src="https://unpkg.com/dentity/dist/dentity.min.js"></script>

Usage

There are two main functions in Dentity:

    encode(str)

and

    decode(str, is_strict=false, convert_nbsp_to_sp=false)

To encode a string, use the encode function:

    Dentity.encode("hello > < ≠");

which results in

     "hello > < ≠" 

and similarly you can use decode function to do the reverse transform:

    Dentity.decode("hello > < ≠");

which will give "hello > < ≠" back.

The decode function takes a second argument is_strict which if true causes the function to only accept W3C valid encodings and doesn't accept the exceptions like &copy (without the semicolon at the end). Its default value is false.

The last argument of the decode function is convert_nbsp_to_sp. By definition,   and its equivalents are decoded to code 160 which means a non-breaking space, but in a text what we normally expect from a space is code 32 which is breakable and code 160 may lead to unforeseen results. As a workaround for this, Dentity offers a way to convert   to code 32 instead of code 160. You can enable this by setting convert_nbsp_to_sp to true. As stated, its default value is false.

A helper function registerPrototypeFunctions is also available, that would register both functions on String.prototype as encodeHTML and decodeHTML so the above examples can be done like:

    "hello > < ≠".encodeHTML()

and

    "hello > < ≠".decodeHTML()

which can be very helpful in most situations, but this is not the default behavior because of the possibility of unwanted consequences like name collisions. So one should call

    Dentity.registerPrototypeFunctions();

once after importing Dentity in order to use them.

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Copyright (C) 2023 Arash Kazemi contact.arash.kazemi@gmail.com. All rights reserved.

Dentity project is subject to the terms of BSD-2-Clause License. See the LICENSE file for more details.