HTML entities

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created September 29, 2005 · complexity basic · author Jos van den Oever · version 5.7

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There are several ways to deal with HTML entities.

Simple search & replace

This code allows you to escape your HTML entities with one shortcut key: Change (<, >, &) to (&lt;, &gt;, &amp;), or the reverse.

Note that this does not escape all characters that should be escaped, just the most common.

function HtmlEscape()
  silent s/&/\&/eg
  silent s/</\&lt;/eg
  silent s/>/\&gt;/eg
endfunction

function HtmlUnEscape()
  silent s/&lt;/</eg
  silent s/&gt;/>/eg
  silent s/&amp;/\&/eg
endfunction

map <silent> <c-h> :call HtmlEscape()<CR>
map <silent> <c-u> :call HtmlUnEscape()<CR>

If you add this code to your vimrc, you can escape visually-selected HTML with ctrl-h, and unescape with ctrl-u.

Automagic escaping

There's also script that does this for you automagically when you read and write files, so you can view the characters, and write the codes, or vice versa: script#909.

Originally written for Java unicodes, but there is also a setting for html codes.

The script is for &nnn style encoding, not the html entities.

perl HTML::Entities

Note: Vim needs to compiled with the "perl" feature enabled for this to work

A slightly more complex solution that escape all characters is using perl, you will need perl and HTML-Parser

function! HTMLEncode()
perl << EOF
 use HTML::Entities;
 @pos = $curwin->Cursor();
 $line = $curbuf->Get($pos[0]);
 $encvalue = encode_entities($line);
 $curbuf->Set($pos[0],$encvalue)
EOF
endfunction

function! HTMLDecode()
perl << EOF
 use HTML::Entities;
 @pos = $curwin->Cursor();
 $line = $curbuf->Get($pos[0]);
 $encvalue = decode_entities($line);
 $curbuf->Set($pos[0],$encvalue)
EOF
endfunction

map <Leader>h :call HTMLEncode()<CR>
map <Leader>H :call HTMLDecode()<CR>

Go to the line and do \h or \H to check it out.

Comments

can check it with

.! php -r "echo htmlentities('<cword>');"