Parse string into HTML

Question

I'm trying to recreate a blog CRUD application in which a user can create posts by inputting text into a textarea of a <form>. From here the input is stored in Postgresql as the type text for later use. I'd like to parse that string of text into HTML.

The issue I am having:

User inputs a string of what would be formatted into HTML. The program would take this string and format it into raw HTML.

What input is expected:

<h2>Title here</h2>
<p>some text here</p>

What is should be formatted to:

Title here

some text here

How it is displayed:

&lt;h2&gt;Title here &lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;some text here &lt;/p&gt;

What I have done:

I've read about using a WYSIWYG text editors like CKEditor and TinyMCE. I even used CKEditor but when I save the input into the database it's rendered as a string not the HTML I want, which makes sense. I've also used modules such as HTML5lib, html and BeautifulSoup but it's still rendering as '<h2>Title here</h2><p>some text here</p>' with the single quotations. So it's still a string. I want to escape the first and last quotes but not every single one between.

Basically I am trying to reproduce this very text editor on Stackoverflow. I am storing the input as a Postgresql text data type. I figured it's optimal to format the string into HTML when it is retrieved from the database, and not before it is stored (wrong?). I have even implemented a class to do so, like:

class Post():
  body = db.Column(db.Text)

def to_html(self, body):
  '''format string of chars to HTML. Return HTML'''
  # ...

Then in the html template I could (I'm using Jinja to do this):

{{ Post.to_html(body) }}

I believe I am confused about encoding/decoding text and html.

i think you are confused cus you're confusing me.... you realize that HTML is a string... — I wrestled a bear once.
– I wrestled a bear once., Commented May 5, 2016 at 19:45

Joseph · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-06 01:27:32Z

2

You need to understand a bit about html... What you have is raw HTML:

<h2>Title here</h2><p>some text here</p>

Save that in a blank file with a .htm extension, then open it with a browser. The browser interprets the raw HTML and gives you the formatted output you want.

I suggest you read this tutorial before continuing with your project.

answered May 6, 2016 at 1:27

Joseph

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7 Comments

KA01 Over a year ago

the text is stored into Postgresql as the type text under the table Post in the row Post.body. It isn't stored as a file. When I extract the data in Post.body and place it into an html template it comes out, for example, like <h2>here is some text </h2> but it suppose to be rendered as <h2>here is some text</h2> (but here its formatted without the tags)

Joseph Over a year ago

Storing html as text/string is fine... That's all html is. You don't need to worry about how it looks until you display it to a user.

Joseph Over a year ago

Are you looking at your result in a browser? You're not going to get formatted text in whatever shell you're using.

KA01 Over a year ago

Yes I'm using a browser and using the browsers dev tool

Joseph Over a year ago

ok... so, you're escaping <> with < and > but its converting them back so that the browser sees <h2> as <h2> and displays "here is some text" as a heading. Correct?

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Parse string into HTML

The issue I am having:

What input is expected:

What is should be formatted to:

Title here

How it is displayed:

What I have done:

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Title here

How it is displayed:

What I have done:

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