How to make cheerio not to self-close tags?

When using cheerio to parse and manipulate HTML, you may encounter issues where cheerio automatically closes tags such as <br>, <img>, or other empty elements. Cheerio, which is based on jQuery's core functionality, typically handles the closing of these tags automatically.

If you need to ensure that tags are not automatically closed, consider the following approaches to resolve or avoid this issue:

1. Use XML mode for parsing: Cheerio provides an option to parse HTML in XML mode, which preserves the original state of all tags and prevents automatic closing of empty elements. For example:

   javascript
   const cheerio = require('cheerio');
   const html = `<div>Hello <br> world</div>`;
   const $ = cheerio.load(html, { xmlMode: true });
   console.log($.html());

   This will output HTML that retains the <br> tag in its unclosed form.

2. Manually handle specific tags: If you only need to handle specific tags, you can process them specially during cheerio operations, such as adding a closing tag or replacing them with a self-closing version. For instance, you can replace all <br> tags with <br/>:

   javascript
   const processedHtml = $('body').html().replace(/<br>/g, '<br/>');
   console.log(processedHtml);

   This method requires adjustment based on your specific scenario to ensure it does not affect the rendering of other elements.

Using any of the above methods can help you better control the parsing and output of HTML content, avoiding unnecessary automatic closing. The choice of method depends on your specific requirements and the complexity of the HTML content you are processing.