I just wanted to encode my own mail address on a static HTML page to prevent it from being collected by SPAM bots or crawlers. However the
tool I used for this vanished together with my old website. I searched for a similar tool in the Internet but after about 10 seconds I had an excuse
to make a new one on my own. :3
The HTML obfuscator basically replaces the normal characters with their respective HTML escape code. Markdown also uses this
approach and randomly mixes the decimal and hex representation of the character code and PHP Markdown takes it a bit further and
adds some scarce unencoded characters to the mix so I used this algorithm.
Just put your text (mail address, Jabber-URI, Skype name, etc.) into the tool and it will output the encoded version. Since the main usage are mail
addresses it will also output a mailto: URI as well as a complete mailto: link with the mail address as text.
I also played around with some special Unicode characters to break the long codes lines in a more pleasant way. The soft hyphen (U+00AD) is
displayed as a normal hyphen (-
) if it's at the end of a line otherwise it's not displayed at all. The zero width space (U+200B)… well, is like
a normal space but can not be seen. Basically it's just an offer to the browser to break the line where ever you insert it. However if I would embed
such special characters into the code generated by the tool you would copy and paste them along with the code and this would surely confuse
some people. Therefore I abandoned this idea (even if it looked quite good) and used the usual overflow: auto scrollbars.
Anyway, I hope some people find this tool useful. If you have questions or some ideas just post a comment or drop me a mail.