http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=927975


in reply to Re: Distinguish between HTML and Plain text
in thread Distinguish between HTML and Plain text

But you can guess very reliably because HTML must have an HTML element
I forgot to mention that the html entered may be just a part of HTML, so assuming presence of "<html" tag will not work.
  • Comment on Re^2: Distinguish between HTML and Plain text

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Re^3: Distinguish between HTML and Plain text
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Sep 26, 2011 at 23:36 UTC

    This is HTML:

    Please use <code>...</code> tags around your code.

    This is text:

    Please use <code>use strict;</code> in your code.

    How can one possibly correctly identify them programatically?

    PS - This is the reason Atom is better than RSS. RSS doesn't provide a mean of specifying the content type, so it can't distinguish between text and HTML content. Clients have to guess. You could take a peek at how RSS clients do it, but I suspect they might work with less ambiguous content than you.