HTML Tag That Causes Other Tags To Be Rendered As Plain Text

February 27, 2023 Post a Comment

I'd like to add an area to a page where all of the dynamic content is rendered as plain text instead of markup. For example: Hello Wor

Solution 1:

You can do this with the script element (bolded by me):

The script element allows authors to include dynamic script and data blocks in their documents.

Example:

<script type="text/plain">
This content has the media type plain/text, so characters reserved in HTML have no special meaning here: <div> ← this will be displayed.
</script>

(Note that the allowed content of the script element is restricted, e.g. you can’t have </script> as text content (it would close the script element).)

Typically, script elements have display:none by default in browser’s CSS, so you’d need to overwrite that in your CSS, e.g.:

script[type="text/plain"] {display:block;}

Solution 2:

The tag used to be <XMP> but in HTML 4 it was already deprecated. Browser's don't seem to have dropped its support but I would not recommend it for anything beyond quick debugging. The MDN article about <XMP> lists two other tags, <plaintext> and <listing>, that were deprecated even earlier. I'm not aware of any current alternative.

Whatever, the code to encode plain text into HTML is pretty straightforward in most programming languages.

Note: the term similar means exactly that—all three are designed to inject plain text into HTML. I'm not implying that they are synonyms or that they behave identically—they don't.

Solution 3:

You can use a function to escape the < >, eg:

'span.name': function(){
return this.name.replace(/</g, '&lt;').replace(/>/g, '&gt;');
}

Also take a look at <plaintext></plaintext>. I haven't used it myself but it is known to render everything that follows as plain text(by everything i mean to say it ignores the closing tag, so all the following code is rendered as text)

Solution 4:

No, that's not possible, you need to HtmlEncode it.

If your using a server-side language, that's not really difficult though.

In .NET you would do something like this:

string encodedtext = HttpContext.Current.Server.HtmlEncode(plaintext);

Solution 5:

In my application, I need to prevent HTML from rendering

"if (a<b || c>100) ..."

and

"cout << ...".

Also the entire C++ code region HTML must pass through the GCC compiler with the desired effect. I've hit on two schemes:

First:

//<xmp>
#include <string>
//</xmp>}

For reasons that escape me, the <xmp> tag is deprecated. I find (2016-01-09) that Chrome and FF, at least, render the tag the way I want. While researching my problem, I saw a remark that <xmp> is required in HTML 5.

Second, in <head> ... </head>, insert:

<style type="text/css">
    textarea { border: none; }
</style>

Then in <body> ... </body>, write:

//<br />  <textarea rows="4" disabled cols="80">
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
//</textarea>  <br />

Note: Set "cols="80" to prevent following text from appearing on the right. Set "rows=..." to one more line than you enclose in the tag. This prevents scroll bars. This second technique has several disadvantages:

The "disabled" attribute shades the region
Incomprehensible, complex comments in the code sent to the compiler
Harder to understand
More typing

However, this methhod is neither obsolete nor deprecated. The gods of HTML will make their faces to shine unto you.

Html5 Ready