Develop Reference

Opening/Closing tag formatting mismatch

When receiving HTML from backend encountering that escape characters has whitespace, thus not allows to close tag and show text, like show below in the example.
<p&#6 2;Please check for BAC and get customer to confirm via secure phone line the account change. "customer has wrote wrong bankname" does not confirm the account change.</p>
Whitespace can be in various place of the tag <p&#62 ; <p& #62; <p > and also appear for the opening tags.
Would there be possibility to avoid whitespace, that would allow to create tag and create a formatting solution?

As #kissu suggested, it seems the cleanest solution would be to fix it on back-end. Especially, as the closing tag is fine.
If that's not an option, you can use JavaScript to remove the extra space, e.g. with something like this:
const response = '<p&#6 2;Please check for BAC...</p>';
const fixedResponse = response.replace(/(<.*)\s(.*;)/, "$1$2");
This script finds characters "<" and ";", and removes a space between them.
If you have multiple issues like this in the response, you might need to update the regex to make it more robust.
Documentation: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/replace#specifying_a_string_as_the_replacement

Regex in Google Apps Script practical issue. Forms doesn't read regex as it should

I hope its just something i'm not doing right.
I've been using a simple script to create a form out of a spreadsheet. The script seems to be working fine. The output form is going to get some inputs from third parties so i can analyze them in my consulting activity.
Creating the form was not a big deal, the structure is good to go. However, after having the form creator script working, i've started working on its validations, and that's where i'm stuck at.
For text validations, i will need to use specific Regexes. Many of the inputs my clients need to give me are going to be places' and/or people's names, therefore, i should only allow them usign A-Z, single spaces, apostrophes and dashes.
My resulting regexes are:
//Regex allowing a **single name** with the first letter capitalized and the occasional use of "apostrophes" or "dashes".
const reg1stName = /^[A-Z]([a-z\'\-])+/
//Should allow (a single name/surname) like Paul, D'urso, Mac'arthur, Saint-Germaine ecc.
//Regex allowing **composite names and places names** with the first letter capitalized and the occasional use of "apostrophes" or "dashes". It must avoid double spaces, however.
const regNamesPlaces = /^[^\s]([A-Z]|[a-z]|\b[\'\- ])+[^\s]$/
//This should allow (names/surnames/places' names) like Giulius Ceasar, Joanne D'arc, Cosimo de'Medici, Cosimo de Medici, Jean-jacques Rousseau, Firenze, Friuli Venezia-giulia, L'aquila ecc.
Further in the script, these Regexes are called as validation pattern for the forms text items, in accordance with each each case.
//Validation for single names
var val1stName = FormApp.createTextValidation()
.setHelpText("Only the person First Name Here! Use only (A-Z), a single apostrophe (') or a single dash (-).")
.requireTextMatchesPattern(reg1stName)
.build();
//Validation for composite names and places names
var valNamesPlaces = FormApp.createTextValidation()
.setHelpText(("Careful with double spaces, ok? Use only (A-Z), a single apostrophe (') or a single dash (-)."))
.requireTextMatchesPattern(regNamesPlaces)
.build();
Further yet, i have a "for" loop that creates the form based on the spreadsheets fields. Up to this point, things are working just fine.
for(var i=0;i<numberRows;i++){
var questionType = data[i][0];
if (questionType==''){
continue;
}
else if(questionType=='TEXTNamesPlaces'){
form.addTextItem()
.setTitle(data[i][1])
.setHelpText(data[i][2])
.setValidation(valNamesPlaces)
.setRequired(false);
}
else if(questionType=='TEXT1stName'){
form.addTextItem()
.setTitle(data[i][1])
.setHelpText(data[i][2])
.setValidation(val1stName)
.setRequired(false);
}
The problem is when i run the script and test the resulting form.
Both validations types get imported just fine (as can be seen in the form's edit mode), but when testing it in preview mode i get an error, as if the Regex wasn't matching (sry the error message is in portuguese, i forgot to translate them as i did with the code up there):
A screenshot of the form in edit mode
A screeshot of the form in preview mode
However, if i manually remove the bars out of this regex "//" it starts working!
A screenshot of the form in edit mode, Regex without bars
A screenshot of the form in preview mode, Regex without bars
What am i doing wrong? I'm no professional dev but in my understanding, it makes no sense to write a Regex without bars.
If this is some Gforms pattern of reading regexes, i still need all of this to be read by the Apps script that creates this form after all. If i even try to pass the regex without the bars there, the script will not be able to read it.
const reg1stName = ^[A-Z]([a-z\'])+
const regNamesPlaces = ^[^\s]([A-Z]|[a-z]|\b[\'\- ])+[^\s]$
//Can't even be saved. Returns: SyntaxError: Unexpected token '^' (line 29, file "Code.gs")
Passing manually all the validations is not an option. Can anybody help me?
Thanks so much

This
/^[A-Z]([a-z\'\-])+/
will not work because the parser is trying to match your / as a string literal.
This
^[A-Z]([a-z\'\-])+
also will not work, because if the name is hyphenated, you will only match up to the hyphen. This will match the 'Some-' in 'Some-Name', for example. Also, perhaps you want a name like 'Saint John' to pass also?
I recommend the following :)
^[A-Z][a-z]*[-\.' ]?[A-Z]?[a-z]*
^ anchors to the start of the string
[A-Z] matches exactly 1 capital letter
[a-z]* matches zero or more lowercase letters (this enables you to match a name like D'Urso)
[-\.' ]? matches zero or 1 instances of - (hyphen), . (period), ' (apostrophe) or a single space (the . (period) needs to be escaped with a backslash because . is special to regex)
[A-Z]? matches zero or 1 capital letter (in case there's a second capital in the name, like D'Urso, St John, Saint-Germaine)

Special Characters in JSON return value throwing errors

I have some code using datatables and one of the fields that is returned is a string value and lately people have been pasting values in this field from emails that contain some special characters like those found in MS-Word smart quotes. When it tries to display I get an error.
If I copy / paste the text into notepad++ I can see some strange symbols. Once I remove them the error goes away.
Is there away to some how strip all special characters from my text with a function call in Javascript?

Does this woks for you:
myStr=myStr.replace(/[^\w\s]/gi, '')
You can add more characters to this "white list" for example:
myStr=myStr.replace(/[^\w\s,\/#!$%\^&\*;:]/gi, '');

Javascript How to escape \u in string literal

Strange thing...
I have a string literal that is passed to my source code as a constant token (I cannot prehandle or escape it beforehand).
Example
var username = "MYDOMAIN\tom";
username = username.replace('MYDOMAIN','');
The string somewhere contains a backslash followed by a character.
It's too late to escape the backslash at this point, so I have to escape these special characters individually like
username = username.replace(/\t/ig, 't');
However, that does not work in the following scenario:
var username = "MYDOMAIN\ulrike";
\u seems to introduce a unicode character sequence. \uLRIK cannot be interpreted as a unicode sign so the Javascript engine stops interpreting at this point and my replace(/\u/ig,'u') comes too late.
Has anybody a suggestion or workaround on how to escape such a non-unicode character sequence contained in a given string literal? It seems a similar issue with \b like in "MYDOMAIN\bernd".

I have a string literal that is passed to my source code
Assuming you don't have any < or >, move this to inside an HTML control (instead of inside your script block) or element and use Javacript to read the value. Something like
<div id="myServerData">
MYDOMAIN\tom
</div>
and you retrieve it so
alert(document.getElementById("myServerData").innerText);
IMPORTANT : injecting unescaped content, where the user can control the content (say this is data entered in some other page) is a security risk. This goes for whether you are injecting it in script or HTML

Writing var username = "MYDOMAIN\ulrike"; will throw a syntax error. I think you have this string coming from somewhere.
I would suggest creating some html element and setting it's innerHTML to the received value, and then picking it up.
Have something like:
<div id="demo"></div>
Then do document.getElementById("demo").innerHTML = username;
Then read the value from there as document.getElementById("demo").innerHTML;
This should work I guess.
Important: Please make sure this does not expose the webpage to script injections. If it does, this method is bad, don't use it.

Converting special characters in c# string to html special characters

I am using .Net:
fulltext = File.ReadAllText(#location);
to read text anyfile content at given locatin.
I got result as:
fulltext="# vdk10.syx\t1.1 - 3/15/94\r# #(#)Copyright (C) 1987-1993 Verity, Inc.\r#\r# Synonym-list Database Descriptor\r#\r$control: 1\rdescriptor:\r{\r data-table: syu\r {\r worm:\tTHDSTAMP\t\tdate\r worm:\tQPARSER\t\t\ttext\r\t/_hexdata = yes\r varwidth:\tWORD\t\tsyv\r fixwidth:\tEXPLEN\t\t\t2 unsigned-integer\r varwidth:\tEXPLIST\t\tsyx\r\t/_hexdata = yes\r }\r data-table: syw\r {\r varwidth:\tSYNONYMS\tsyz\r }\r}\r\r ";
Now, I want this fulltext to be displayed in html page so that special characters are recognized in html properly. For examples: \r should be replaced by line break tag
so that they are properly formatted in html page display.
Is there any .net class to do this? I am looking for universal method since i am reading file and I can have any special characters. Thanks in advance for help or just direction.

You're trying to solve two problems:
Ensure special characters are properly encoded
Pretty-print your text
Solve them in this order:
First, encode the text, by importing the System.Web namespace and using HttpUtility (asked on StackOverflow). Use the result in step 2.
Pretty-printing is trickier, depending on the amount of pretty-printing that you want. Here are a few approaches, in increasing order of difficulty:
Put the text in a pre element. This should preserve newlines, tabs, spaces. You can still adjust the font used using CSS if you first slap a CSS class on the pre.
Replace all \r, \r\n and remaining \n with <br/>.
Study the structure of your text, parse it according to this structure, and provide specific tags in specific contexts. For example, the tab characters in your example may be indicative of a list of items. HTML provides the ol and ul elements for lists. Similarly, consecutive line breaks may indicate paragraphs, for which HTML provides the well known p element.

Thanks Everyone here for your valuable comment. I solved my formatting problem in client side with following code.
document.getElementById('textView').innerText = fulltext;
Here textview is the div where i want to display my fulltext . I don't think i need to replace special characters in string fulltext. I output as shown in the figure.