How to convert to HTML code?

Question

Are there any scripts that can convert between text (e.g. <hi>) and the html entities version (<hi>) like this website does? Or at least a PHP file?

Solution 1

The perl CGI module has a escapeHTML function that makes it pretty easy:

perl -e 'use CGI qw(escapeHTML); print escapeHTML("<hi>\n");'

Or to do an entire file:

perl -p -e 'BEGIN { use CGI qw(escapeHTML); } $_ = escapeHTML($_);'  FILENAME

Solution 2

The recode utility supports HTML as one of the encodings. (You can even specify an HTML version.) In the text-to-entities direction, it will also recode non-ASCII characters into entities; you need to specify the correct input encoding (e.g. ASCII, latin1, utf-8, …).

recode utf8:html <input-file.txt >output-file.txt
recode l1..html file-to-recode.txt

Solution 3

xmlstarlet can do it both ways:

echo '<em>Ampersands & angle brackets need to be encoded.</em>' |
xmlstarlet esc | 
xmlstarlet unesc

Comments

[Alen Milakovic]

I'm not sure what "html entities version" means. Can you elaborate on how this differs from regular html conversioni? If you just want a text to html coverter, a quick search shows txt2html.sourceforge.net.

[Michael Mrozek]

I don't think this is what he wants; he wants either a command-line tool or a PHP script that will take text input and escape HTML entities

[Toby Speight]

Welcome to Unix & Linux! Whilst this may theoretically answer the question, it would be preferable to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference.