Clean up your Web pageswith HTML TIDY
Clean up your Web pagesCopyright © 1999 W3C, see tidy.c for copyright notice.
With many thanks to Hewlett Packard for financial support during the development of this software!
This version 22nd January 1999
This release fixes a number of bugs, see the release notes, below.
A free graphical user interface for HTML Tidy is now available for windows 95/98/NT.
To get the latest version of Tidy please visit the original version of this page at: http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy. Courtesy of Netmind, you can register for email reminders when new versions of tidy become available.
How to use Tidy | Release Notes | Downloading Tidy | Acknowledgements
When editing HTML it's easy to make mistakes. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a simple way to fix these mistakes automatically and tidy up sloppy editing into nicely layed out markup? Well now there is! Dave Raggett's HTML TIDY is a free utility for doing just that. It also works great on the atrociously hard to read markup generated by specialized HTML editors and conversion tools, and can help you identify where you need to pay further attention on making your pages more accessible to people with disabilities.
Tidy is able to fix up a wide range of problems and to bring to your attention things that you need to work on yourself. Each item found is listed with the line number and column so that you can see where the problem lies in your markup. Tidy won't generate a cleaned up version when there are problems that it can't be sure of how to handle. These are logged as "errors" rather than "warnings".
Tidy corrects the markup in a way that matches where possible the observed rendering in popular browsers from Netscape and Microsoft. Here are just a few examples of how TIDY perfects your HTML for you:
<h1>heading <h2>subheading</h3>
is mapped to
<h1>heading</h1> <h2>subheading</h2>
<p>here is a para <b>bold <i>bold italic</b> bold?</i> normal?
is mapped to
<p>here is a para <b>bold <i>bold italic</i> bold?</b> normal?
<h1><i>italic heading</h1> <p>new paragraph
In Netscape and Internet Explorer this causes everything following the heading to be in the heading font size, not the desired effect at all!
Tidy maps the example to
<h1><i>italic heading</i></h1> <p>new paragraph
<i><h1>heading</h1></i> <p>new paragraph <b>bold text <p>some more bold text
Tidy maps this to
<h1><i>heading</i></h1> <p>new paragraph <b>bold text</b> <p><b>some more bold text</b>
<h1><hr>heading</h1> <h2>sub<hr>heading</h2>
Tidy maps this to
<hr> <h1>heading</h1> <h2>sub</h2> <hr> <h2>heading</h2>
<a href="#refs">References<a>
Tidy maps this to
<a href="#refs">References</a>
<body> <li>1st list item <li>2nd list item
is mapped to
<body> <ul> <li>1st list item</li> <li>2nd list item</li> </ul>
Tidy inserts quote marks around all attribute values for you. It can also detect when you have forgotten the closing quote mark, although this is something you will have to fix yourself.
Tidy has a comprehensive knowledge of the attributes defined in the HTML 4.0 recommendation from W3C. This often allows you to spot where you have mistyped an attribute or value.
Tidy will even work out which version of HTML you are using and insert the appropriate DOCTYPE element, as per the W3C recommendations.
This is something you then have to fix yourself as Tidy is unsure of where the > should be inserted.
You can choose which style you want Tidy to use when it generates the cleaned up markup: for instance whether you like elements to indent their contents or not.
Tidy offers you a choice of character encodings: US ASCII, ISO Latin-1, UTF-8 and the ISO 2022 family of 7 bit encodings. The full set of HTML 4.0 entities are defined. Cleaned up output uses HTML entity names for characters when appropriate. Otherwise characters outside the normal range are output as numeric character entities.
Tidy offers advice on accessibility problems for people using non-graphical browsers. The most common thing you will see is the suggestion you add a summary attribute to table elements. The idea is to provide a summary of the table's role and structure suitable for use with aural browsers.
Many tools generate HTML with an excess of FONT, NOBR and CENTER tags. Tidy's -clean option will replace them by style properties and rules using CSS. This makes the markup easier to read and maintain as well as reducing the file size! Tidy is expected to get smarter at this in the future.
XML processors compliant with W3C's XML 1.0 recommendation are very picky about which files they will accept. Tidy can help you to fix errors that cause your XML files to be rejected. Tidy doesn't yet recognize all XML features though, e.g. it doesn't yet understand CDATA sections or DTD subsets.
The -slides option allows you to burst a single HTML file into a number of linked slides. Each H1 element in the input file is treated as delimiting the start of a slide. The slides are named slide1.html, slide2.html, slide3.html etc. This is a new feature and ideas are welcomed as to how to improve it.
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<p>
para which has enough text to cause a line break, and so test
the wrapping mechanism for long lines.
</p>
<pre>This is
<em>genuine
preformatted</em>
text
</pre>
<ul>
<li>
1st list item
</li>
<li>
2nd list item
</li>
</ul>
<!-- end comment -->
</body>
</html>
and this is the default style:
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<p>para which has enough text to cause a line break, and so test
the wrapping mechanism for long lines.</p>
<pre>This is
<em>genuine
preformatted</em>
text
</pre>
<ul>
<li>1st list item </li>
<li>2nd list item</li>
</ul>
<!-- end comment -->
</body>
</html>
tidy [[options] filename]*
HTML tidy is not (yet) a windows program. If you run tidy without any arguments, it will just sit there waiting to read markup on the stdin stream. Tidy's input and output default to stdin and stdout respectively. Errors are written to stderr but can be redirected to a file with the -f filename option.
I generally use the -m option to get tidy to update the original file, and if the file is particularly bad I also use the -f option to write the errors to a file to make it easier to review them. Tidy supports a small set of character encoding options. The default is ASCII, which makes it easy to edit markup in regular text editors.
For instance:
tidy -f errs.txt -m index.html
which runs tidy on the file "index.html" updating it in place and writing the error messages to the file "errs.txt". Its a good idea to save your work before tidying it, as with all complex software, tidy may have bugs. If you find any please let me know!
To get a list of available options use:
tidy -help
You should see something like this:
options for tidy vers: 11th June 1998 -indent or -i indent element content -omit or -o omit optional endtags -wrap 72 wrap text at column 72 (default is 68) -upper or -u force tags to upper case -clean or -c replace font, nobr & center tags by CSS -raw don't o/p entities for chars 128 to 255 -ascii use ASCII for output, Latin-1 for input -latin1 use Latin-1 for both input and output -utf8 use UTF-8 for both input and output -iso2022 use ISO2022 for both input and output -numeric or -n output numeric rather than named entities -modify or -m to modify original files -errors or -e show only error messages -f file write errors to file -xml use this when input is in XML -asxml to convert HTML to XML -slides to burst into slides on h1 elements -help list command line options
Input and Output default to stdin/stdout respectively. Single letter options apart from -f may be combined as in: tidy -f errs.txt -imu foo.html
Tidy no longer complains about a missing </tr> before a <tbody>. Added link to a free win32 GUI for tidy.
Added a link to the OS/2 distribution of Tidy made available by Kaz SHiMZ. No changes to Tidy's source code.
Fixed bug in ParseBlock that resulted in nested table cells.
Fixed clean.c to add the style property "text-align:" rather than "align:".
Disabled line wrapping within HTML alt, content and value attribute values. Wrapping will still occur when output as XML.
This release fixes a problem with missing quotemarks in attribute values introduced in the December 14th release. It also fixes problems with parsing tables when the table cells include naked list items and when unexpected end tags are encountered for td and tr cells. Warnings are now generated for unknown entities (those not defined by HTML 4.0). It may be worth thinking about a new option to determine how to handle these, especially for XML.
Rewrote parser for elements with CDATA content to fix problems with tags in script content.
New pretty printer for XML mode. I have also modified the XML parser to recognize xml:space attributes appropriately. I have yet to add support for CDATA marked sections though.
script and noscript are now allowed in inline content.
To make it easier to drive tidy from scripts, it now returns 2 if any errors are found, 1 if any warnings are found, otherwise it returns 0. Note tidy doesn't generate the cleaned up markup if it finds errors other than warnings.
Fixed bug causing the column to be reported incorrectly when there are inline tags early on the same line.
Added -numeric option to force character entities to be written as numeric rather than as named character entities. Hexadecimal character entities are never generated since Netscape 4 doesn't support them.
Entities which aren't part of HTML 4.0 are now passed through unchanged, e.g. &precompiler-entity; This means that an isolated & will be pass through unchanged since there is no way to distinguish this from an unknown entity.
Tidy now detects malformed comments, where something other than whitespace or '--' is found when '>' is expected at the end of a comment.
The <br> tags are now positioned at the start of a blank line to make their presence easier to spot.
The -asxml mode now inserts the appropriate Voyager html namespace on the html element and strips the doctype. The html namespace will be usable for rigorous validation as soon as W3C finishes work on formalizing the definition of document profiles, see: WD-html-in-xml.
Fixed bug wherein <style type=text/css> was written out as <style type="text/ss">.
Tidy now handles wrapping of attributes containing JavaScript text strings, inserting the line continuation marker as needed, for instance:
onmouseover="window.status='Mission Statement, \ Our goals and why they matter.'; return true"
You can now set the wrap margin with the -wrap option.
When the output is XML, tidy now ensures the content starts with <?xml version="1.0"?>.
The Document type for HTML 2.0 is now "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//". In previous versions of tidy, it was incorrectly set to "-//W3C//DTD HTML 2.0//".
When using the -clean option isolated FONT elements are now mapped to SPAN elements. Previously these FONT elements were simply dropped.
NOFRAMES now works fine with BODY element in frameset documents.
The code is in ANSI C and uses the C standard library for i/o. The parser is thread-safe although the code for pretty printing the parse tree is not (yet). The parser works top down, building a complete parse tree in memory. Document text is held as Unicode represented as UTF-8 in a character buffer that expands as needed. The code has so far been tested on Windows'95, Windows NT, Linux, MacOS, BeOS, OS2, SunOS, Solaris, IRIX and HP-UX, amongst others.
If you are prepared to maintain a public URL for HTML Tidy compiled for a specific platform, please let me know so that I can add a link to your page. This will avoid the need for me to update this page whether you recompile.
Conventions for whether lines end with CRLF, LF or CR vary from one system to another. I have included the C source for a utility tab2space which can be used to ensure that files use the line end convention of your choice, and to expand tabs to spaces.
tab2space -t4 -unix *.h *.c tab2space -tabs -unix Makefile
Note use of "-tabs" to ensure that tabs are preserved in the Makefile (it won't work without them!).
For those of you on Unix, here is a script you can use to strip carriage returns:
#!/bin/sh
echo Stripping Carriage Returns from files...
for i
do
# If a writable file
if [ -f $i ]
then
if [ -w $i ]
then
echo $i
# strip CRs from input and output to temp file
tr -d '\015' < $i > toix.tmp
mv toix.tmp $i
else
echo $i: write-protected
fi
else
echo $i: not a file
fi
done
Save this script to a file, e.g. "scripcr" and use "chmod +x stripcr" to make it executable. You can then run it as "stripcr *.c *.h Overview.html Makefile"
I would like to thank the many people who have written to me with suggestions for improvments or reporting bugs. Your help has been invaluable.
Joe D'Andrea, Jerry Andrews, Christer Bernerus, Keith Blakemore-Noble, Eric Blossom, Keith B. Brown, Maurice Buxton, Trevor Carden, Kendall Clark, Jeremy Clulow, Dan Connolly, Keith Davies, Claus André Färber, Stephanie Foott, Michael Giroux, Léa Gris, Francisco Guardiola, Juha Häikiö, G. Ken Holman, Rick Jelliffe, Charles LaFountain, Michael Kay, Johannes Koch, Rudy Kohut, Nick Leverton, Dietmar Lippold, Gert-Jan C. Lokhorst, Anton Marsden, Ian McKellar, Matt Oshry, Gerald Oskoboiny, Ernst Paalvast, Ross L. Richardson, Philip Riebold, Erik Rossen, Klaus Johannes Rusch, Eric Schindler, J. Schlauch, Christian Schüler, Jim Seymour, Kazuyoshi SHIMIZU, Geoff Sinclair, Jo Smith, Michael J. Suzio, Oren Tirosh, Charles A. Upsdell, Larry W. Virden, Jez Wain
Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> is an engineer from Hewlett Packard's UK Laboratories, and works on assignment to the World Wide Web Consortium, where he is the W3C lead for HTML, Math and Voice Browsers.