Retrieving HTML from CouchBase into Node.js / Express 4 leaves it unrendered

Question

I'm having a small issue with rendering HTML, stored in CouchBase, fetched by Node.js

In CouchBase I have several small HTML-snippets. They contain text, tags such as <br /> and html entities such as <. They are of course stored as an escaped string in JSON.

So far, so good. However when I pull it out and display on the page, it is rendered "as-is", without being interpreted as HTML.

For example:

[ some content ...]
<p>Lorem is &gt; ipsum<br />And another line</p>
[rest of content ...]

From the controller in Express 4:

var express = require('express');
var router = express.Router();

var couchbase = require('couchbase');
var cluster = new couchbase.Cluster('couchbase://myserver');
var bucket = cluster.openBucket('someBucket', 'somePassword');

var Entities = require('html-entities').XmlEntities;
entities = new Entities();
var utf8 = require('utf8');

/* GET home page. */
router.get('/', function(req, res) {



    bucket.get('my:thingie:44', function(err, result) {
         if(err) throw err
         console.log(result);
        var html = utf8.decode(entities.decode(result.value.thingie.html));
        // var html =   utf8.encode(result.value.thingie.html);
        // var html =   utf8.decode(result.value.thingie.html);
        res.render('index', { title: 'PageTitle', content: html });
    });

});

It is then passed to the template (using hogan.js) for rendering.

When looking into this I found that it might have something to do with the encoding of the <'s and <'s that prevent it from being parsed. You can see my converting attempts in the code, where none of the options gave the desired result, i.e. rendering the contents as HTML.

When using utf8.decode(), no difference. Using utf8.encode(), no difference. Using entities.decode() it convert < into < as predicted, but it's not rendered even if <div;&gt becomes <div>.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I found the solution over here: Partials with Node.js + Express + Hogan.js

When putting HTML in a Hogan template, you have to use {{{var}}} instead of {{var}}. And thus it renders beautifully, as intended :)

Wasn't encoding issues at all ;)