My PHP generates a Word document, but it will not render carriage returns. My CKEditor translates a carriage return into either,
<br>, or <div>asdf</div>
When the Word document is created, it will display those HTML tags, so I strip them out. What replacement code, character, ascii, or tag can I use so that when the page is rendered, it shows the text like it did in the Editor?
Current example - if you have the text "Don't jump off the" [then hit Enter, so that the next word is below it]...
"cliff." Instead, currently, that gets saved into SQL as:
Don't jump off the <br>cliff.
Don't jump off the <div>cliff</div>.
...depending on which browser is used. In the msWord output, any tags left in the content [exceptions to strip_tags function] get displayed literally in msWord. Or, if I replace the tags with ASCII
it displays that literally, too. Not sure if this helps, but this is defined at the top of my php report_generator.php file:
require_once '/var/www/PhpWord/src/PhpWord/Autoloader.php';
\PhpOffice\PhpWord\Autoloader::register();
include "/var/www/ncpcphp/NCPC_PHP_Functions.php";
DEFINE("WRITEtoFDOCS", "NO");
DEFINE("FDOCSDIRECTORY", "Contract Attachments");
DEFINE("MIMETYPE","application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document" );
Help - what can I use to cause the output to show the carriage return?
Thank you, Cindy. Your answer is a piece of the solution. My CKEditor saves carriage returns as either
<br>, <br />, or <div></div>
depending on which browser is used Chrome[div] or Firefox[br] - that goes into my msSQL. Yet, if my editor has turned-on an "Enter filter" [keycode-13] in order to prevent someone from enter-editing a [[Placeholder]] (ckeditor read-onlyplugin) then saved editor text strips out the Enter. So, I did this: kept in the enter filter because it is necessary, then after the text carriage returns are saved as br's or div's, when I run my report generator, I replace
<br>, <br />, and <div></div>
with "\n" like you said. Then I explode the text variable like this:
$show_cad = explode("\n", $show_cad);
foreach($show_cad as $line) {
$section->addText(htmlspecialchars($line));
}
The code in the editor needed to filter out the Enters only when Enter is pressed in the [[Placeholder]] plug in is more complex, and I got largely from CKEditor themselves. They request that I do not post their full solutions, but if you like I could show you pieces of it. Basically, I had to register the Placeholder widget. Then when Enter is pressed, it checks if the context is with Placeholder. If so, filter the Enter [then it disappears from the saved editor text], but if Enter is pressed elsewhere, it gets saved and used properly.
Thank you for your help!
Related
I have jrxml report, which gets exported into .docx format,
I have static text resources (.properties) with "\n" or "<br>" signs in values, like so:
In jasperreports 'preview' tab it looks ok:
But when .docx format is used...:
I figured out that when you paste pilcrow/paragraph (by pressing enter key) in word itself,
justified alignment works ok,
but with <br> or \n jasper inserts new line (shift enter equivalent) and it breaks everything.
May be someone knows what could be done.
Thanks!
Found the solution:
To brake row I use tab/newline ( <br> via HTML or \t\n via Java),
Text before tab/newline is aligned to the left border, text after is still justified well along the page.
We have a SAPUI5 timeline control, where we are showing the comments coming from server.
The issue is, if the comments contain a newline \n, then the Timeline control is not able to display the text in newline. Instead, it introduces space wherever \n is present.
We have tried formatting \n to unicode character also but that also didn't worked. Timeline control aggregates TimelineItem.
The control we are using is: https://ui5.sap.com/#/api/sap.suite.ui.commons.TimelineItem
Code snippet can be found at:
https://jsbin.com/kuluyehilu/edit?html,output
I inspected your example and came up with the following solution.
Since the text is embedded in a <span>, all unnecessary whitespace will be trimmed. What you can do is telling the span (via CSS) that it should display the whitespace anyway.
If you don't have a CSS file in your project yet, create one. Then add the following lines
div.sapSuiteUiCommonsTimelineItemShellBody>span {
white-space: pre;
}
This should do the trick.
JSBin: https://jsbin.com/feladeneso/1/edit?html,output
If you inspect the rendered element, you will see it actually put in the break:
<span id="__item0-realtext">x
y</span>
...but did not convert it to a <br/> tag. You cannot add the tag yourself since it will be escaped, either. Maybe you can try to override the renderer, and convert any line breaks to html breaks
I'm using TinyMce textarea editor and have a problem. As you probably know Tinymce transforms a standard html textarea into a rich text editor.
On our 'edit listing' page we call up some text from our db for the user to edit (previously in a standard textarea, now in the tinymce textarea.
Previously the standard textarea would preserve linebreaks and the user would get several paragraphs of text in the text area, now with tinyMCE they get a huge chunk of text with no linebreaks. (I have pasted an example of an entry in our db below - as you can see it has line breaks in it by tinymce seems to be ignoring them when it displays them in the editor).
Just to clarify my issue is now that tinymce is stripping something when I submit the form, it's that when I pull text (that contains line breaks) from the db and populate the tinymce textarea with that data (for the user to edit) in the tinymce textarea - the text appears (in the tinymce textarea) as one massive chunk of text with my paragraphs (whereas in a standard textarea it is nicely formatted with linebreaks)
Any help on how to resolve this would be greatly appreciated - do I need to use some sort of populate() type function to put the text in, or maybe I need to replace all the linebreaks with a different special character that tinyMCE will recognise as a line break and preserve?..
Thanks in advance.
Nick
example from db:
Here is line one
Here is line two
And here is line three
Which appears in tinymce as:
Here is line one Here is line two And here is line three
I faced a similar a problem, a while back and had questions just like yours. Also I finally ended up on SE just like you.
Anyway, I think I have the solution to your problem. If you are using PHP as your server side language, then you should use nl2br() PHP function.
Suppose you have stored your content fetched from the database in a php variable. Something like this:
$content = $row['content'];
Now when displaying it on to your screen, use the nl2br() function.
echo nl2br("<p>".$content."<p>");
Now, this part inside () depends on how you want to output the data. And I will leave it to you to figure that part out.
Hope this helps.
I'm trying to add a hyperlink to a mail merge field. So something like this:
{HYPERLINK "{MERGEFIELD "Links" }"}
So I create a field like this.
{ MERGEFIELD Links }
And the above works (it displays different links for different recipients).
However, when I go to Edit Field, and then attempt to add HYPERLINK to { MERGEFIELD Links}, Word will not allow me. Meaning that when I type HYPERLINK followed by a space, the "variable" field is gone. Instead of word displaying...
LINK
it displays...
{HYPERLINK "{MERGEFIELD "Links" }"}
even after I press "update field". So Word is not letting me enter HYPERLINK for some reason.
How do I solve this?
From the Microsoft Web Site,
On the Insert menu, click Field (under Quick Parts in later office versions).
In the Field names list, click Hyperlink,
and then click OK. The text Error! Hyperlink reference not valid
appears in the document.
Press ALT+F9 to open the { HYPERLINK \* MERGEFORMAT } field code.
Put the insertion point after HYPERLINK and then add a space.
On the Insert menu, click Field. In the Field names list, click MergeField. In the Field name text box, type the name of the data source field that contains the hyperlink, and then click OK. For example, if the name of the data source field is "Address1," the field code appears as follows: { HYPERLINK { MERGEFIELD "Address1" } \* MERGEFORMAT }
Press ALT+F9 to close the field code. You now have Error! Hyperlink reference not valid text.
Put the insertion point at some arbitrary place in the middle of the Error! Hyperlink reference not valid text, and insert the text you want to appear. If you would like a merge field, insert that from the "Insert Merge Field" option on the menu.
Delete the remaining text of Error! ... before and after the text you want to keep.
Note: If your merge field only contains an identifier, with the URL to be provided as a static part of the merge document, this can work also. On Step 5, you will need to insert the URL text as well as the MergeField, for example:
{ HYPERLINK "https://www.myurl.com/EditForm.aspx?ID={ MERGEFIELD ID }" \* MERGEFORMAT }
I also have been struggling with this. What I found to be the key is creating the document from SCRATCH and not saving it before executing the mail merge. Here are the steps I used:
open a new document and click on the step by step mail merge wizard; add your generic text.
To add the variable hyperlink go to insert>quick parts>fields
select hyperlink on the left and click okay
Use alt + F9 to see the hyperlink field code
Type “” and between them insert your merged field so that {HYPERLINK \* MERGEFORMAT} -> becomes {HYPERLINK"{MERGEFIELD"Constructed_URL"}"\*MERGEFORMAT}
Press ALT+F9 to hide the field code
Click in the text "Error! Hyperlink reference not valid" and replace with something generic like click here.
Complete the mail merge BEFORE you save the document.
Hope this helps and good luck!
Start with the process here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912679
However, like user1867326 indicated, the hyperlink (which should be variable with the mail merge) is converted into a static link when the Word file is reopened.
A solution that seems to work is adding a bookmark within the hyperlink field code immediatly after the mergefield.
{ HYPERLINK { MERGEFIELD "Link" } \* MERGEFORMAT }
Click between the } and \ and go to INSERT > Bookmark, give it a name, and this seems to prevent Word from replacing the mergefield with a static hyperlink.
This answer is adapted and hopefully clarified from the clever solution described here:
Mailmerge dynamic hyperlink fields lost after save/reload of document - Word 2010
This is what worked for me for an email mail merge with variable hyperlinks that all display the same text. I am using Office 2016 Word.
Put the insertion point where you would like the link display text to be in the document.
On the Insert menu, click Quick Parts, and select Field.
In the Field Names list, click Hyperlink, and then click OK. The text Error! Hyperlink reference not valid appears in the document.
Press ALT+F9 to open the { HYPERLINK * MERGEFORMAT } field code. 5. Put the insertion point after HYPERLINK.
On the Insert menu, click Quick Parts, and select Field. In the Field Names list, click MergeField.
In the Field name text box, type the name of the data source field that contains the hyperlink, and then click OK. For example, if the name of the data source field is "Address1," the field code appears as follows: { HYPERLINK { MERGEFIELD Address1 } * MERGEFORMAT }
Press ALT+F9 to close the field code. You now have Error! Hyperlink reference not valid text.
Put the insertion point just before the period in ‘Error! Hyperlink reference not valid text.’ and delete all the text except for the period. Write in the link display text. Make sure not to delete the period (this is important).
To check that the hyperlinks are mapping, right click on the link display text and click edit hyperlink. You will see the correct link in the address field for each record.
I like to style the period text color to white so it looks invisible.
I have had limited success with the other suggestions - basically, Word is buggy in this area. There is a simple alternative - indeed the only alternative AKAIK if you want the hyperlink to vary AND the text that is displayed to vary too (not an unreasonable requirement).
Note that this only works for DOCUMENT MERGES, not for EMAIL MERGES, since it relies on processesing the output document.
The trick is to add a place marker (text that serves as an ID) wherever you want a hyperlink. Insert this via a regular mergefield. In your table of source data, you need columns
place marker, text_for_display, hyperlink
You then need to put your source data into Excel (if that isn't where you have it already) and put this formula
="Set Rng = ActiveDocument.Content: Rng.Find.Execute FindText:="""&[place marker]&""": ActiveDocument.Hyperlinks.Add Anchor:=Rng, Address:="""&[hyperlink]&""", TextToDisplay:="""&[text_for_display]&""""
into a blank column in the first row, and fill down.
You need to amend [place marker],[hyperlink] and [text_for_display] to the appropriate cell references.
If the [hyperlink] includes a query string, you may find you want to build it using a formula, based on other data in the source.
The resulting formulae can then be pasted into a macro and run on the output document.
You may then want to use the "Robbins/Mayor" macro http://www.wordbanter.com/showthread.php?t=18346 to split the generated documents.
I got this working thanks to this thread, but then it stopped working and I figured out why so I thought I'd say thanks by posting what I discovered here.
The issue is that word has a special type of curly brace. Copying the code text from this thread may not work for that reason. To get the curly braces Word wants, I used Fn + Command + F9 on my Mac running Catalina and Office 365. Apparently some Mac users may find Command + F9 works -- just test to find out. I'm sure Windows has a similar keystroke set. I found the Mac solution in this post.
Also, the syntax that works for me is: { HYPERLINK { MERGEFIELD "url" } * MERGEFORMAT } where "url" is the label of the column with the link in my Excel file. Note the position of the quotes. This differs from other posts here (I tried the other combinations) but I wouldn't be surprised if the syntax may vary across Word versions and operating systems.
To get this method to work in Mac Office 365 (Big Sur), you need to know about the Toggle Field Codes in the context menu. The shortcut above to replicate the Alt-F9 behavior will create a new field, instead of allowing you to edit the field that exists.
At these steps:
Press ALT+F9 to open the { HYPERLINK * MERGEFORMAT } field code.
OR
Press ALT+F9 to close the field code. You now have Error! Hyperlink reference not valid text.
Instead of the keyboard shortcut, right click on the error message and select Toggle Field Codes from the context menu.
Answer worked great for me with this adjustment! Thank you!
I have a Word document with fields of the reference variety, which occur in the form "[field].[field]"--in other words, there's a period between the two fields. I want to globally replace this with a space.
Word offers the ^d special character to search for fields, but for some reason the query "^d.^d" does not find anything. However, ".^d" does. Now comes the problem, however--what do I specify as the replacement text in order to retain the field code? If using regular expressions, I could use a "Find What Expression" such as \1, but with regexp ("wild card") mode the ^d is not permitted.
I guess I could write a macro...
I would like to add to Bibadia's solution.
An example of an index entry field; we want to change a name we misspelled.
Make sure hidden formatting is displayed (toggle with SHIFT+CTRL+F8).
Make sure wildcards option is not selected. To search for fields, use the opening and closing field braces code (optionally use ^w for spaces, as Bibadia suggested):^19 XE "Deo, John" ^21
Replace won't recognize field braces character, but will allow to insert the clipboard's content. ;). To do that, insert in text the correct entry. CTRL+F9 to insert field and type:XE "Doe, John"
Select the field above and copy
Use ^c in the replace box
Hit Replace All
Ta-da!
It's usually better to go the macro route when finding fields because, as you say, the find algorithm that Word uses doesn't work the way you might hope with fields.
But if you know exactly what the fields contain, you can specify a search pattern that will probably work (however not in wildcard mode).
For example, if you want to look for figure number field pairs such as
{ STYLEREF 1 \s }.{ SEQ Figure \* ARABIC \s 1 }
(which would typically be the same set of fields everywhere in the document)
If you only really need to look for the following:
{ STYLEREF 1 \s }.<any field>
you could ensure that field codes are displayed and search for
^d STYLEREF 1 \s ^21.^d
or
^19 STYLEREF 1 \s ^21.^19
If you need to be more precise, you can spell out the second field as well.
"^d" only works for finding the field beginning, not the field end.
It's a shame that ^w wants to find at least 1 whitespace character because otherwise it would be more robust to look for
^19^wSTYLEREF^w1^w\s^w^21.^19
Perhaps someone else knows how to work around that without using wildcards?
Torzaburo,
I suggest that you do this using a macro. You can start by recording the macro, and later refining your processing steps within the macro.
First turn on the hidden characters by navigating to Home > Paragraph > toggle the show/hide Paragraph symbol. Also, select all and toggle the field codes on (right-click and select "Toggle Field Codes".
Open a new blank Word doc in addition to the one you have open. You will use this later. Start the macro recording and find the field using the "^d" (field code) as you said.
When the field is found, copy only the field text within the brackets, and not the full field reference. While the macro is still recording, ALT + TAB to the new blank document and paste the field code in as plain text.
At this point, do the necessary find & replace processing to the field codes. Highlight the processed field codes, copy, ALT + TAB back to the original document, and paste back between the { } brackets.
Stop the macro recording. Add any further custom processing to the macro VBA.
Select-All and re-toggle the field codes. Update the field codes.
You don't need a macro. Just toggle all field codes on by using Alt+F9. Then do a find and replace for what you want to change. Once the replacement is complete, use Alt+F9 again to toggle the field codes back off.
Disclaimer: I didn't originate this solution, but it's clean and elegant and I thought it should be included here:
(Adapted from Search & Replace Field Codes in Word):
Create or find a single instance of the field you want to convert text to
Toggle Field Codes visible (AltF9)
Copy the code for the field you want to use to the Clipboard (highlight and CtrlC)
Open the Replace dialog box (CtrlH), insert the text you want to replace in the Find What box and then enter ^c in the Replace With box.
This will replace your text with the contents of the Clipboard, turning it into the field code you copied in step 3. It also copies formatting information (font, color, etc.), to control how the field will appear when hidden. (Caveat: I've tested this with Word 2003 under Windows 7 only.)
Coming in late on this, probably way too late for Beth (sorry Beth). And this may not be quite what Beth was looking for. But for anyone interested ...
It sounds like Beth may have created captions throughout the document using INSERT CAPTION (hence the presence of field codes). This means these captions will have been (automatically) created in CAPTION style.
To globally replace the separator "." with " " (space) in such captions, take two steps:
[1] Go to REFERENCES | INSERT CAPTION, then click on NUMBERING and replace the SEPARATOR "." with "EM-DASH". This will replace all separators in captions for the selected label in the CAPTION Window. If you have other labels in use in the document (e.g. FIGURE), select the other labels one by one and repeat this process.
[2] Do a find/replace searching for special character "em-dash" (^+) in style CAPTION, replacing with " ". Click REPLACE ALL.
Voila!
NOTE: This presumes that em-dash does not appear in the caption text anywhere. If it does, then you'll need to do a pre- and post- "fiddle" to ensure these em-dashes are not touched by the global replace above.
The "pre-fiddle" is to do a global find/replace across captions, replacing the em-dash ("^+") with some other string (e.g. "EM-DASH") that doesn't ever occur in any caption's text. Then you do the separator change as described above. Finally, the "post-fiddle" is to restore the em-dashes that were in the captions, by doing a global replace of the string "EM-DASH" with the actual em-dash character "^+".