master ← fix-html-to-markdown
merged 10:21AM - 30 Apr 20 UTC
TLDR; this commit vastly improves how whitespaces are handled when converting fr…om HTML to Markdown.
It also adds support for converting HTML `<tables>` to markdown tables.
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The previous `remove_whitespaces!` method was traversing the whole HTML tree and used a heuristic to remove
leading and trailing whitespaces whenever it was appropriate (ie. mostly before and after HTML block elements)
It was a good idea, but it was very limited and leaded to bad conversion when the html had leading whitespaces on several lines for example.
One such example can be found [here](https://meta.discourse.org/t/86782).
For various reasons, most of the whitespaces in a HTML file is ignored when the page is being displayed in a browser.
The rules that the browsers follow are the [CSS' White Space Processing Rules](https://www.w3.org/TR/css-text-3/#white-space-rules).
They can be quite complicated when you take into account RTL languages and other various tidbits but they boils down to the following:
- Collapse whitespaces down to one space (0x20) inside an inline context (ie. nodes/tags that are being displaying on the same line)
- Remove any leading/trailing whitespaces inside an inline context
One quick & dirty way of getting this 90% solved would be to do `HTML.gsub!(/[[:space:]]+/, " ")`.
We would also need to hoist `<pre>` elements in order to not mess with their whitespaces.
Unfortunately, this solution let some whitespaces creep around HTML tags which leads to more `.strip!` calls than I can bear.
I decided to "_emulate_" the browser's handling of whitespaces and came up with a solution in 4 parts
#### 1. `remove_not_allowed!`
The HtmlToMarkdown library is recursively "visiting" all the nodes in the HTML in order to convert them to Markdown.
All the nodes that aren't handled by the library (eg. `<script>`, `<style>` or any non-textual HTML tags) are "swallowed".
In order to reduce the number of nodes visited, the method `remove_not_allowed!` will automatically delete all the nodes
that have no "visitor" (eg. a `visit_<tag>` method) defined.
#### 2. `remove_hidden!`
Similar purpose as the previous method (eg. reducing number of nodes visited), there's no point trying to convert something that is hidden.
The `remove_hidden!` method removes any nodes that was hidden using the "hidden" HTML attribute, some CSS or with a width or height equal to 0.
#### 3. `hoist_line_breaks!`
The `hoist_line_breaks!` method is there to handle `<br>` tags. I know those tiny `<br>` don't do much but they can be quite annoying.
The `<br>` tags are inline elements but they visually work like a block element (ie. they create a new line).
If you have the following HTML "`<i>Foo<br>Bar</i>`", it ends up visually similar to "`<i>Foo</i><br><i>Bar</i>`".
The latter being much more easy to process than the former, so that's what this method is doing.
The `hoist_line_breaks` will hoist `<br>` tags out of inline tags until their parent is a block element.
#### 4. `remove_whitespaces!`
The `remove_whitespaces!` is where all the whitespace removal is happening. It's broken down into 4 methods as well
- `remove_whitespaces!`
- `is_inline?`
- `collapse_spaces!`
- `remove_trailing_space!`
The `remove_whitespace!` method is recursively walking the HTML tree (skipping `<pre>` tags).
If a node has any children, they will be chunked into groups of inline elements vs block elements.
For each chunks of inline elements, it will call the `collapse_space!` and `remove_trailing_space!` methods.
For each chunks of block elements, it will call `remote_whitespace!` to keep walking the HTML tree recursively.
The `is_inline?` method determines whether a node is part of a inline context.
A node is inline iif it's a text node or it's an inline tag, but not `<br>`, and all its children are also inline.
The `collapse_spaces!` method will collapse any kind of (white) space into a single space (" ") character, even across tags.
For example, if we have "` Foo \n<i> Bar </i>\t42`", it will return "`Foo <i>Bar </i>42`".
Finally, the `remove_trailing_space!` method is there to remove any trailing space that might creep in at the end of the inline chunk.
This solution is not 100% bullet-proof.
It does not support RTL languages at all and has some caveats that I felt were not worth the work to get properly fixed.
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FIX: switched Nokogiri to Nokogumbo for better HTML5 parsing
FIX: better detection of hidden elements when converting HTML to Markdown
FIX: take into account the `allowed_href_schemes` site setting when converting HTML `<a>` to Markdown
FIX: added support for 'mailto:' scheme when converting `<a>` from HTML to Markdown
FIX: added support for `<img>` dimensions when converting from HTML to Markdown
FIX: added support for `<dl>`, `<dd>` and `<dt>` when converting from HTML to Markdown
FIX: added support for multilines emphases, strongs and strikes when converting from HTML to Markdown
FIX: added support for `<acronym>` when converting from HTML to Markdown
DEV: remove unused 'sanitize' gem
Wow, did you just read all that?! Congratz, here's a cookie: 🍪.
