Thread: C Programmer, please help me!!!

Hi!!!

I'm needing to change a "very simple" behavior of an opensource C based software, but I haven't any experience on C language.

Ok man, let's go!

The program is "HTML Tidy" and you can obtain the source code
and reference material respectively at:

- http://tidy.sourceforge.net/src/tidy_src.tgz

- http://tidy.sourceforge.net

This is a great program to tidy and format your dirty html.

The problem is that it doesn't work if it encounter unknown elements(tags)
in html. Then you must declare these unknown
elements(tags) for properly works, what isn't a good idea in our XML days.

obs: there is a file called "parser.c" at src dir, might the solution is there. Piece of code extracted from it ....

Code:

        /* ignore unknown start/end tags */
        if ( node->tag == NULL )
        {
            ReportWarning( doc, element, node, DISCARDING_UNEXPECTED );
            FreeNode( doc, node );
            continue;
        }

Thus I need help to suppress this unwanted behavior, making it accept any
unknown elements(tags).

I believe that isn't hard to change the piece of code to accomplish it, but
as I said, I'm ignorant in the C world.

Can you understand me???


Thanks in advance,

marcoBR

btw, sorry 4 my english...

>Thus I need help to suppress this stupid behavior, making it accept any
unknown elements(tags).
And what were you planning on doing with these unknown elements? There's a good reason for that 'stupid behavior'; you can't reasonably expect the program to handle unknown entities intelligently, so you assume that they shouldn't be there and report an error. This is how compilers work as well, if the compiler finds something that it doesn't recognize, it doesn't just leave it there and keep going as it's probably erroneous.

Hey, at least it could have an option to permit unknown elements... it should be very useful.

Assume you don't know what are the elements, e.g a third party XHTML or XML file, thus how to register these elements???

For maintain a beauty code with all registered elements it's a valid approach, but it lacks on functionality, if you can undestand me, hope.

The case is: Would be so hard to change it to accept any unknown elements??!?

>The case is: Would be so hard to change it to accept any unknown elements??!?
It depends on what you consider hard. With little knowledge of C I would suggest finding another pretty printer that handles XML.

Excellent WaltP, you understood me perfectly!

But what the program does is for each unknown tag it displays a warning and removes the tag (and the data between I assume)

Worse of this, it displays an 'error message' and presents a blank file as output. If you use the config option --force-output, then it removes the unknown tags and all their contents.

It seems HTML Tidy, at the moment, claims for beauty wanting to format inclusive the "unkwnown tags" for it.

Is there any way to change the code, so that it will NOT
discard tags it doesn't recognize, but it will still Tidy what it does
recognize?

Would be so hard to change it to accepting any unknown tags, letting the beauty for them aside?!?!?

Originally posted by marcoBR Is there any way to change the code, so that it will NOT
discard tags it doesn't recognize, but it will still Tidy what it does
recognize?

Of course.

Not knowing the code, I would assume if it finds '<' it assumes a tag. It then tests the next few characters and if they are not in a list of accepted values, the error is displayed and the rest of the tag is read and tossed (or worse).

What you need to do is after comparing the next few characters, if they don't match known tags, output what you just read and simply continue without going thru the "tidy" portion of the code.

WaltP - He doesn't know C. He's looking for someone to write code for him...which probably isn't very likely.

Originally posted by marcoBR
I'm still needing this patch... any help?!??!

We've tried to help, but you won't give us the information we need to help. I said in my last post:

Not knowing the code, I would assume...

Maybe you don't realize it, but noone can give you what you want without knowing what you have. You're asking us to rewrite your program without knowing the program. I gave you what help I could, it's now up to you.

And as confuted implied, we're not going to write the program for you.

Vacuous 5 month old post bump - closed