Display Malformed HTML "Safely?"

Question

Let's say I have some HTML like this:

<ol><li>a knock at the door, I'll be back in a second

which I display as inline HTML within a div that I produce. Is there any way to stop the inner, malformed HTML from screwing up the alignment of the entire document that comes after the HTML?

I realize that intelligently parsing it is one option (since I do have it on the server side), but I'm looking for a lighter solution.

Edit I know I could just replace the < and > with entities, but I want to keep the formatting (within reason).

Answer 1

Replace < and > with ascii/unicode equivalents < and > OR < and > OR \u003c and \u003e

Answer 2

Do you need the inline text to support HTML? If not, you could just strip all HTML tags, or replace <> with escapes. Or you could store the text on the server as Markdown or any other non-HTML language and generate good HTML on the fly.

Edit: If you really need HTML, I suggest that you run an XML validator on the HTML snippet. You don't actually need to look at the structure of the XML: if the snippet is well-formed then it's very unlikely that it will break the rest of the layout.

Answer 3

Despite you looking for a 'lighter solution' than HTML parsing, you might want to consider using HTML Purifier or HTML Tidy, since that should take care of broken tags for you - that's essentially what they were made for.