Escape symbols being converted to literals in SimplyHTML notes which is complicating diff check

[sgjohnson1981]

Description:
I notice that certain HTML entities within the notes attribute of nodes (which are embedded as HTML in XML format) are automatically being converted to their literal character equivalents upon saving (or parsing?) the mindmap. For example, the entity " is being converted to a plain double quote (").

I guess these special characters need to be properly escaped within the XML. This automatic conversion is problematic for my use case, as I'd like to use diff in order to ensure the script changes only what I intended and nothing else.

Expected Behavior:

When saving an .mm file, freeplane-io should have an option to preserve HTML entities in the exact format they were originally represented.

Actual Behavior:

HTML entities are being converted to their literal equivalents when saving, which leads to discrepancies between the original and modified files. This behavior makes it difficult to accurately diff files to check only for intended changes.

Environment:

Freeplane version : 1.12.6

freeplane-io version: 0.9.0

Python version: 3.12.3

Platform: Ubuntu 24.04

Steps to Reproduce:

Load an existing Freeplane .mm file with escaped HTML entities in the notes attribute (e.g., " for a double quote).

Modify any node using freeplane-io and save the mindmap.

Observe that the saved .mm file has the entities replaced with their literal values.

[sgjohnson1981]

Lol. Seems github converts them as well. It converts & q u o t ; to "

[nnako]

Hi @sgjohnson1981 ,

thanks for your report. These are the characters I recognized during the last 2.5 years within different portions of the node's attributes:

• " -> " (doublequote)
• ' -> ' (singlequote)
• 
 -> &#10 (line feed)

In order to identify the "real" changes done within my generated mindmaps, I helped myself by loading the generated mindmap back into the Freeplane editor and save it again from there. This did a back transformation of unintendedly changed characters like the ones above. Maybe this would be a workaround for you?

by the way...

If you were interested in comparing XML files and filtering only the "real" changes done on the user level, you could have a look into the respective discussion among the Freeplane community. You will see that there are some other issues when trying to identify "real" changes, as Freeplane stores updated meta information as well. So, modification dates, folding states, color changes, style changes, ... get changed automatically and stored along the user-intended "real" changes. This makes the comparison of mindmaps (especially when edited by multiple people) extremely tedious.

I will see if I can move a bit forward concerning the preservation of special character representation in the way the Freeplane editor does it. Even within the Freeplane editor, the implementation of the file representation changed around v1.5. This might even become a "moving target" in the long run ;-) .

Hope this helps a bit, for now.

[sgjohnson1981]

I tried the resaving trick. It doesn't seem to work. The entities aren't converted back.