Exporting HTML tags

[Nigel Strudwick]

I suspect this has been asked many times before...

I've got a number of URLs in my databases, which I want to be active in an exported HTML file--I've added href tags to some of them. Now when they get exported, all the critical HTML characters (e.g. < & >) are expanded out into HTML entities (rather like they do on this forum). This of course means they're not read as HTML tags by a browser, but as literal characters.

Is there a way of stopping this conversion which seems to happen as an inevitable part of the export process, or am I forever condemned to editing them back before I use the HTML as a web page?

Thanks!

[comment]

I believe the best way to do this is to export as XML, and use a XSLT style-sheet to transform the result to HTML.

[Nigel Strudwick]

Thanks very much. That does sound rather daunting, so it looks as if editing is the best solution.

Not being able to export HTML tags seems a rather fundamental oversight in FMP does it not?

Cheers...

[comment]

Not being able to export HTML tags seems a rather fundamental oversight in FMP does it not?

No, not at all - quite the contrary. In fact, you CAN export HTML tags quite easily, IF you're exporting to a text format. But if you are exporting as HTML table, Filemaker needs to add markup tags of its own in order to create the table. To protect the table from being mangled by actual field contents, it must make sure these are properly escaped. How else could someone export a table where a cell is SUPPOSED to contain the text "all values <50"?

Filemaker does provide a VERY flexible option in the form of customized XML export, which is really the best choice for transforming columnar data to marked-up text (and a variety of other formats) in general.