About html-entities

Html-entities lets you encode and decode entities in HTML.

Encoding

(html-entities:encode-entities "This string contains <>&") => "This string contains &lt;&gt;&amp;"

By default, it will encode all strange characters. For example,

(html-entities:encode-entities "ø ¬ Û") => "ø ¬ Û"

You can make it a different set of characters by providing the encode-entities function with a regex. Only matching characters will be encoded:

;; only encode <, >, and &
(html-entities:encode-entities "ø ¬ Û <> &" :regex "[<>&]") => "ø ¬ Û &lt;&gt; &amp;"

You can also control the behavior with the variables *encode-using-named-entities* and *encode-in-hexadecimal*.

• *encode-using-named-entities* -- default is t. When true, use names for entities if possible.
• *encode-in-hexadecimal* -- default is t. When true, use hexadecimal rather than decimal to encode entities that have no name.

Decoding

(html-entities:decode-entities "ø ¬ Û") => "ø ¬ Û"

The decode-entities function has no special options, it simply decodes everything it comes across.

SGML mode

The special variable *enable-sgml* (nil by default) makes the encoding functions use the SGML mappings for encoding and decoding rather than the HTML ones. SGML entities are almost a perfect superset of HTML entities, with the exception of ', which maps to U+0027 (the normal single-quote character) in HTML but U+02BC (MODIFIER_LETTER_APOSTROPHE) in SGML. You probably don't need this, unless you get errors when decoding someone else's text because the SGML entities aren't recognized.

Other Notes

This library requires cl-ppcre. It has only been tested with SBCL, but it doesn't have anything crazy that should cause trouble with other Common Lisp implementations. Unicode might be a problem, I'm not sure how that's handled in other lisps.

Html-entities was originally written by Aaron Sokoloski (asokoloski@gmail.com). The old repository is here