MarkupRegions is stripping out HTML comments

[gebeer]

Hello,

MarkupRegions is stripping out HTML comments by default. I just discovered that while converting a rather old project to use MarkupRegions. In that project HTML comments are required for some knockout.js code to work. And I was scratching my head for quite a while until I recognized that those comments got removed. This behaviour is nowhere being mentioned in the documentation, other than in the code itself at https://github.com/processwire/processwire/blob/3acd7709c1cfc1817579db00c2f608235bdfb1e7/wire/core/WireMarkupRegions.php#L89. And an old forum post mentions it. 

How can I tell MarkupRegions that my markup is required to stay exactly the same or in other words, where can I pass options ("exact" =>true) to MarkupRegions find() to change the default behaviour?

[pwired]

Bumping this thread ... Is this issue so new that there is no answer for it (yet) ?

[AndZyk]

I couldn't find anything in the documentation, but in the core file it seems that comments starting with <!--# don't get stripped out:

https://github.com/processwire/processwire/blob/3acd7709c1cfc1817579db00c2f608235bdfb1e7/wire/core/WireMarkupRegions.php#L844

<!--# Comment -->

I tried it and it seems to work.

Regards, Andreas

[pwired]

Quote

but in the core file it seems that comments starting with <!--# don't get stripped out:

Hello AndZyk, thanks for stepping in on this, and going to start playing with MarkUpRegions with it

[cb2004]

ProCache strips out all comments as well. Do you have that installed?

[gebeer]

I made a feature request for documentation improvement: https://github.com/processwire/processwire-requests/issues/454

[gebeer]

23 hours ago, AndZyk said:

I couldn't find anything in the documentation, but in the core file it seems that comments starting with <!--# don't get stripped out:

https://github.com/processwire/processwire/blob/3acd7709c1cfc1817579db00c2f608235bdfb1e7/wire/core/WireMarkupRegions.php#L844

<!--# Comment -->

I tried it and it seems to work.

Regards, Andreas

This only helps in some cases. In my case I need the comment to read 
 

<!-- ko if: properties.ms == "pro" -->

for knockout.js to recognise it. So the other syntax would break my JS.

But thanks for pointing that out.

[bernhard]

Maybe you can trick it by using this?

<!--# <!-- ko if: properties.ms == "pro" -->

 

[gebeer]

16 minutes ago, bernhard said:

Maybe you can trick it by using this?

<!--# <!-- ko if: properties.ms == "pro" -->

 

Unfortunately this is not working. And it looks ugly and feels so wrong ;-)
But thank you for the suggestion.

[Pixrael]

@ryan a possible solution for future enhancements to MarkupRegions is that only comments starting with <!--# are the ones that will be removed in the process and the original html comments will be kept. @gebeer you can try to make that modification in your copy of the code.

[bernhard]

5 hours ago, gebeer said:

And it looks ugly and feels so wrong ?

I totally agree ? 

Another suggestion could be to add a textarea to define custom comment tags that should not get removed, or maybe a regex or such, eg

<!-- ko (having a space after ko)

[gebeer]

9 hours ago, bernhard said:

I totally agree ? 

Another suggestion could be to add a textarea to define custom comment tags that should not get removed, or maybe a regex or such, eg

<!-- ko (having a space after ko)

Thanks again for the suggestion. I really don't want to spend more time for finding a workaround. I'll be waiting until we get some feedback in the feature request and a clean way to avoid stripping comments. In the meantime, I fell back to good old if statements for including the necessary HTML blocks.

[bernhard]

5 hours ago, gebeer said:

I really don't want to spend more time for finding a workaround. I'll be waiting until we get some feedback in the feature request and a clean way to avoid stripping comments.

My suggestion was a suggestion for that feature request, not a workaround ? 

[gebeer]

32 minutes ago, bernhard said:

My suggestion was a suggestion for that feature request, not a workaround ? 

Oh, I see. The feature request is about improving documentation and giving developers a way to disable stripping of comments.

[bernhard]

3 minutes ago, gebeer said:

and giving developers a way to disable stripping of comments.

And exactly that was my suggestion: Ask Ryan not to make something hard-coded or opinionated like a toggle to either strip all <!--# comments --> or to leave all <!--# comments --> as is, but ask him to make that definable by the user, so that he/she can for example tell markupregions to leave all comments that start with " ko " as is, so that knockout comments stay untouched and all other comments still get removed.

That way you would not have to rewrite your codebase and you can use markupregions with any external tool that relies on a custom comments format.