Prevent CKEditor from formatting code in source mode

Question

How can you prevent any automatic formatting when in CKEditor when viewing in source mode?

I like to edit HTML source code directly instead of using the WYSIWYG interface, but whenever I write new lines, or layout tags how I would indent them, it all gets formatted when I switch to WYSIWYG mode and then back to source mode again.

I stumbled upon a CKEditor dev ticket, Preserve formatting of ProtectedSource elements, that alluded to a setting which may have existed once upon a time which would be exactly what I'm after. I just want to know how I can completely turn off all automatic formatting when editing in source mode.

I came up with a solution I thought would be foolproof (albeit not a pleasant one).

I learned about the protectedSource setting, so I thought, well maybe I can just use that and create an HTML comment tag before all my HTML and another after it and then push a regular expression finding the comment tags into the protectedSource array, but even that (believe it or not) doesn't work.

I've tried my expression straight up in the browser outside of CKEditor and it is working, but CKEditor doesn't protect the code as expected (which I suspect is a bug involving comment tags, since I can get it to work with other strings). In case you are wondering, this is what I had hoped would work as a work-around, but doesn't:

config.protectedSource.push( /<!-- src -->[\s\S]*<!-- end src-->/gi );

and what I planned on doing (for what appears to be the lack of a setting to disable formatting in source mode) was to nest all my HTML within the commented tags like this:

<!-- src -->
<div>some code that shouldn't be messed with (but is)</div>
<!-- end src -->

I'd love to hear if anyone has any suggestions for this scenario, or knows of a setting which I have described, or even if someone can just fill me in as to why I can't get protectedSource to work properly with two comment tags.

I really think it's gotta be a bug because I can get so many other expressions to work fine, and I can even protect HTML within the area of a single comment tag, but I simply cannot get HTML within two different comment tags to stay untouched.

Answer 1

My solution to this was to use comments in my system, but before feeding the page content to CKEditor, convert them to custom HTML tags. Then, upon save, convert them back to my comment tags.

For your syntax that would be something like this in PHP. Before printing the page content to the textarea:

$content = str_replace(array('<!-- src -->','<!-- end src -->'),array('<protected>','</protected>'),$content);

Before saving the resulting content:

$content = str_replace(array('<protected>','</protected>'),array('<!-- src -->','<!-- end src -->'),$content);

In the CKEditor configuration:

protectedSource:[/<protected>[\s\S]*<\/protected>/g]

Hope that helps!