Disclaimer: I'm brand new to Elm
I'm fiddling around with the online Elm editor and I've run into an issue. I can't find a way to get certain special characters (copyright, trademark, etc.) to show up. I tried:
import Html exposing (text)
main =
text "©"
All that showed up was the actual text ©
. I also tried to use the unicode character for it \u00A9
but that ended up giving me a syntax error:
(line 1, column 16): unexpected "u" expecting space, "&" or escape code
The only way I found was to actually go to someone's website and copy/paste their copyright symbol into my app:
import Html exposing (text)
main =
text "©"
This works, but I would much rather be able to type these characters out quickly instead of having to hunt down the actual symbols on other websites. Is there a preferred/recommended method of getting non-escaped text when returning HTML in Elm?
Edit:
Specifically for Mac:
©
™
®
All tested in the online editor and they worked. This still doesn't attack the core issue, but it's just something nice to note for these specific special characters.
HTML special characters are assigned an entity name and an entity number, both of which can be used to render the character in an HTML document. These codes and names have a specific format, which is generally represented as &#xxxx; for numbers and &xxxx; for names, where xxxx is either a name or a number.
Some characters are reserved in HTML5. For example, you cannot use the greater than and less than signs or angle brackets within your text because the browser could mistake them for markup. HTML5 processors must support the five special characters listed in the table that follows.
Characters with special meaning in HTML are called reserved characters.
Why this is (intentionally) not so easy
The "makers" of Elm are understandably reluctant to give us a way to insert "special" characters into HTML text. Two main reasons:
How it's possible anyway
That said, the Elm user community has found a loophole that affords a workaround. For the reasons above, it's not recommended, especially not if your text is non-constant, i.e. comes from a source outside your program. Still, people will be wanting to do this anyway so I'm going to document it to save others the trouble I had digging everything up and getting it working:
import Json.Encode exposing (string)
elm-lang/core
so it should already be in your dependencies.import Html.Attributes exposing (property)
property "innerHTML"
and a JSON-Value representation of your text, e.g.:span [ property "innerHTML" (string " ") ] []
I found, that there is a better solution: you can convert special characters from Unicode to char, and then create a string from char:
resString = String.fromChar (Char.fromCode 187)
You can use directly the unicode escape code in Elm strings and chars:
We have a util module containing all our special chars like:
module Utils.SpecialChars exposing (noBreakSpace)
noBreakSpace : Char
noBreakSpace = '\x00A0'
Which can be used as:
let
emptyLabel = String.fromChar noBreakSpace
in
label []
[ span [ ] [ text emptyLabel ]
]
This will render a <span> </span>
I recently created an Elm package that solves this. If you use text' "©"
it'll render the copyright symbol © instead of the escape code. Also works with "©"
and "©"
. Hope this helps!
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