--- name: "tidy" section: "1" platform: "linux" package: "tidy" version: "5.8.0-3" release: "Arch Linux 2026-11-01" platforms: ["linux"] url: "https://new.carta.tech/tidy" --- # tidy(1) check, correct, and pretty-print HTML(5) files ## NAME **tidy** - check, correct, and pretty-print HTML(5) files ## SYNOPSIS **tidy** \[*options*\] \[*file* ...\] \[*options*\] \[*file* ...\] ... ## DESCRIPTION Tidy reads HTML, XHTML, and XML files and writes cleaned-up markup. For HTML variants, it detects, reports, and corrects many common coding errors and strives to produce visually equivalent markup that is both conformant to the HTML specifications and that works in most browsers. A common use of Tidy is to convert plain HTML to XHTML. For generic XML files, Tidy is limited to correcting basic well-formedness errors and pretty printing. If no input file is specified, Tidy reads the standard input. If no output file is specified, Tidy writes the tidied markup to the standard output. If no error file is specified, Tidy writes messages to the standard error. ## OPTIONS Tidy supports two different kinds of options. Purely *command-line* options, starting with a single dash '**-**', can only be used on the command-line, not in configuration files. They are listed in the first part of this section. *Configuration* options, on the other hand, can either be passed on the command line, starting with two dashes **--**, or specified in a configuration file, using the option name, followed by a colon **:**, plus the value, without the starting dashes. They are listed in the second part of this section, with a sample config file. For *command-line* options that expect a numerical argument, a default is assumed if no meaningful value can be found. On the other hand, *configuration* options cannot be used without a value; a *configuration* option without a value is simply discarded and reported as an error. Using a *command-line* option is sometimes equivalent to setting the value of a *configuration* option. The equivalent option and value are shown in parentheses in the list below, as they would appear in a configuration file. For example, **-quiet, -q** (*quiet: yes*) means that using the *command-line* option **-quiet** or **-q** is equivalent to setting the *configuration* option *quiet* to *yes*. Single-letter *command-line* options without an associated value can be combined; for example '**-i**', '**-m**' and '**-u**' may be combined as '**-imu**'. ### File manipulation - **-output \**, **-o \** (*output-file: \*) write output to the specified \ - **-config \** set configuration options from the specified \ - **-file \**, **-f \** (*error-file: \*) write errors and warnings to the specified \ - **-modify**, **-m** (*write-back: yes*) modify the original input files ### Processing directives - **-indent**, **-i** (*indent: auto*) indent element content - **-wrap \**, **-w \** (*wrap: \*) wrap text at the specified \. 0 is assumed if \ is missing. When this option is omitted, the default of the configuration option 'wrap' applies. - **-upper**, **-u** (*uppercase-tags: yes*) force tags to upper case - **-clean**, **-c** (*clean: yes*) replace FONT, NOBR and CENTER tags with CSS - **-bare**, **-b** (*bare: yes*) strip out smart quotes and em dashes, etc. - **-gdoc**, **-g** (*gdoc: yes*) produce clean version of html exported by Google Docs - **-numeric**, **-n** (*numeric-entities: yes*) output numeric rather than named entities - **-errors**, **-e** (*markup: no*) show only errors and warnings - **-quiet**, **-q** (*quiet: yes*) suppress nonessential output - **-omit** (*omit-optional-tags: yes*) omit optional start tags and end tags - **-xml** (*input-xml: yes*) specify the input is well formed XML - **-asxml**, **-asxhtml** (*output-xhtml: yes*) convert HTML to well formed XHTML - **-ashtml** (*output-html: yes*) force XHTML to well formed HTML - **-access \** (*accessibility-check: \*) do additional accessibility checks (\ = 0, 1, 2, 3). 0 is assumed if \ is missing. ### Character encodings - **-raw** output values above 127 without conversion to entities - **-ascii** use ISO-8859-1 for input, US-ASCII for output - **-latin0** use ISO-8859-15 for input, US-ASCII for output - **-latin1** use ISO-8859-1 for both input and output - **-iso2022** use ISO-2022 for both input and output - **-utf8** use UTF-8 for both input and output - **-mac** use MacRoman for input, US-ASCII for output - **-win1252** use Windows-1252 for input, US-ASCII for output - **-ibm858** use IBM-858 (CP850+Euro) for input, US-ASCII for output - **-utf16le** use UTF-16LE for both input and output - **-utf16be** use UTF-16BE for both input and output - **-utf16** use UTF-16 for both input and output - **-big5** use Big5 for both input and output - **-shiftjis** use Shift\_JIS for both input and output ### Miscellaneous - **-version**, **-v** show the version of Tidy - **-help**, **-h**, **-?** list the command line options - **-help-config** list all configuration options - **-help-env** show information about the environment and runtime configuration - **-show-config** list the current configuration settings - **-export-config** list the current configuration settings, suitable for a config file - **-export-default-config** list the default configuration settings, suitable for a config file - **-help-option \** show a description of the \ - **-language \** (*language: \*) set Tidy's output language to \. Specify '-language help' for more help. Use before output-causing arguments to ensure the language takes effect, e.g.,\`tidy -lang es -lang help\`. ### XML - **-xml-help** list the command line options in XML format - **-xml-config** list all configuration options in XML format - **-xml-strings** output all of Tidy's strings in XML format - **-xml-error-strings** output error constants and strings in XML format - **-xml-options-strings** output option descriptions in XML format *Configuration* options can be specified by preceding each option with **--** at the command line, followed by its desired value, OR by placing the options and values in a configuration file, and telling tidy to read that file with the **-config** option: **tidy --***option1* value1 **--***option2* value2 ...\ **tidy -config** *config-file* ... *Configuration* options can be conveniently grouped in a single config file. A Tidy configuration file is simply a text file, where each option is listed on a separate line in the form *option1*: *value1*\ *option2*: *value2*\ etc. The permissible values for a given option depend on the option's Type. There are five Types: *Boolean*, *AutoBool*, *DocType*, *Enum*, and *String*. *Boolean* Types allow any of **yes/no, y/n, true/false, t/f, 1/0**. *AutoBool*s allow **auto** in addition to the values allowed by *Booleans*. *Integer* Types take non-negative integers. *String* Types generally have no defaults, and you should provide them in non-quoted form (unless you wish the output to contain the literal quotes). *Enum*, *Encoding*, and *DocType* Types have a fixed repertoire of items, which are listed in the *Supported values* sections below. You only need to provide options and values for those whose defaults you wish to override, although you may wish to include some already-defaulted options and values for the sake of documentation and explicitness. Here is a sample config file, with at least one example of each of the five Types: *// sample Tidy configuration options*\ *output-xhtml: yes*\ *add-xml-decl: no*\ *doctype: strict*\ *char-encoding: ascii*\ *indent: auto*\ *wrap: 76*\ *repeated-attributes: keep-last*\ *error-file: errs.txt* Below is a summary and brief description of each of the options. They are listed alphabetically within each category. ### Document Display options - **--gnu-emacs** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies that Tidy should change the format for reporting errors and warnings to a format that is more easily parsed by GNU Emacs or some other program. It changes them from the default line \ column \ - (Error\|Warning): \ to a form which includes the input filename: \:\:\: (Error\|Warning): \ See also: **--show-filename** - **--markup** *Boolean* (**yes** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should generate a pretty printed version of the markup. Note that Tidy won't generate a pretty printed version if it finds significant errors (see *force-output*). - **--mute** *String* Use this option to prevent Tidy from displaying certain types of report output, for example, for conditions that you wish to ignore. This option takes a list of one or more keys indicating the message type to mute. You can discover these message keys by using the *mute-id* configuration option and examining Tidy's output. See also: **--mute-id** - **--mute-id** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option indicates whether or not Tidy should display message ID's with each of its error reports. This could be useful if you wanted to use the *mute* configuration option in order to filter out certain report messages. See also: **--mute** - **--quiet** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) When enabled, this option limits Tidy's non-document output to report only document warnings and errors. - **--show-body-only** *Enum* (**no** if unset) Supported values: **no, yes, auto** This option specifies if Tidy should print only the contents of the body tag as an HTML fragment. If set to **auto**, this is performed only if the body tag has been inferred. Useful for incorporating existing whole pages as a portion of another page. This option has no effect if XML output is requested. - **--show-errors** *Integer* (**6** if unset) This option specifies the number Tidy uses to determine if further errors should be shown. If set to **0**, then no errors are shown. - **--show-filename** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should show the filename in messages. eg: tidy -q -e --show-filename yes index.html index.html: line 43 column 3 - Warning: replacing invalid UTF-8 bytes (char. code U+00A9) See also: **--gnu-emacs** - **--show-info** *Boolean* (**yes** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should display info-level messages. - **--show-warnings** *Boolean* (**yes** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should suppress warnings. This can be useful when a few errors are hidden in a flurry of warnings. ### Document In and Out options - **--add-meta-charset** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option, when enabled, adds a *\* element and sets the *charset* attribute to the encoding of the document. Set this option to **yes** to enable it. - **--add-xml-decl** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should add the XML declaration when outputting XML or XHTML. Note that if the input already includes an *\* declaration then this option will be ignored. If the encoding for the output is different from **ascii**, one of the **utf\*** encodings, or **raw**, then the declaration is always added as required by the XML standard. See also: **--char-encoding**, **--output-encoding** - **--add-xml-space** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should add *xml:space="preserve"* to elements such as *\*, *\* and *\* when generating XML. This is needed if the whitespace in such elements is to be parsed appropriately without having access to the DTD. - **--doctype** *String* (**auto** if unset) This option specifies the DOCTYPE declaration generated by Tidy. If set to **omit** the output won't contain a DOCTYPE declaration. Note this this also implies *numeric-entities* is set to **yes**. If set to **html5** the DOCTYPE is set to *\*. If set to **auto** (the default) Tidy will use an educated guess based upon the contents of the document. Note that selecting this option will *not* change the current document's DOCTYPE on output. If set to **strict**, Tidy will set the DOCTYPE to the HTML4 or XHTML1 strict DTD. If set to **loose**, the DOCTYPE is set to the HTML4 or XHTML1 loose (transitional) DTD. Alternatively, you can supply a string for the formal public identifier (FPI). For example: *doctype: "-//ACME//DTD HTML 3.14159//EN"* If you specify the FPI for an XHTML document, Tidy will set the system identifier to an empty string. For an HTML document, Tidy adds a system identifier only if one was already present in order to preserve the processing mode of some browsers. Tidy leaves the DOCTYPE for generic XML documents unchanged. This option does not offer a validation of document conformance. - **--input-xml** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should use the XML parser rather than the error correcting HTML parser. - **--output-html** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should generate pretty printed output, writing it as HTML. - **--output-xhtml** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should generate pretty printed output, writing it as extensible HTML. This option causes Tidy to set the DOCTYPE and default namespace as appropriate to XHTML, and will use the corrected value in output regardless of other sources. For XHTML, entities can be written as named or numeric entities according to the setting of *numeric-entities*. The original case of tags and attributes will be preserved, regardless of other options. - **--output-xml** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should pretty print output, writing it as well-formed XML. Any entities not defined in XML 1.0 will be written as numeric entities to allow them to be parsed by an XML parser. The original case of tags and attributes will be preserved, regardless of other options. ### File Input-Output options - **--error-file** *String* This option specifies the error file Tidy uses for errors and warnings. Normally errors and warnings are output to *stderr*. See also: **--output-file** - **--keep-time** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should keep the original modification time of files that Tidy modifies in place. Setting the option to **yes** allows you to tidy files without changing the file modification date, which may be useful with certain tools that use the modification date for things such as automatic server deployment. Note this feature is not supported on some platforms. - **--output-file** *String* This option specifies the output file Tidy uses for markup. Normally markup is written to *stdout*. See also: **--error-file** - **--write-back** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should write back the tidied markup to the same file it read from. You are advised to keep copies of important files before tidying them, as on rare occasions the result may not be what you expect. ### Diagnostics options - **--accessibility-check** *Enum* (**0 (Tidy Classic)** if unset) Supported values: **0 (Tidy Classic), 1 (Priority 1 Checks), 2 (Priority 2 Checks), 3 (Priority 3 Checks)** This option specifies what level of accessibility checking, if any, that Tidy should perform. Level **0 (Tidy Classic)** is equivalent to Tidy Classic's accessibility checking. For more information on Tidy's accessibility checking, visit Tidy's Accessibility Page at *http://www.html-tidy.org/accessibility/*. - **--force-output** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should produce output even if errors are encountered. Use this option with care; if Tidy reports an error, this means Tidy was not able to (or is not sure how to) fix the error, so the resulting output may not reflect your intention. - **--show-meta-change** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option enables a message whenever Tidy changes the *content* attribute of a meta charset declaration to match the encoding of the document. Set this option to **yes** to enable it. - **--warn-proprietary-attributes** *Boolean* (**yes** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should warn on proprietary attributes. ### Encoding options - **--char-encoding** *Encoding* (**utf8** if unset) Supported values: **raw, ascii, latin0, latin1, utf8, iso2022, mac, win1252, ibm858, utf16le, utf16be, utf16, big5, shiftjis** This option specifies the character encoding Tidy uses for input, and when set, automatically chooses an appropriate character encoding to be used for output. The output encoding Tidy chooses may be different from the input encoding. For **ascii**, **latin0**, **ibm858**, **mac**, and **win1252** input encodings, the *output-encoding* option will automatically be set to **ascii**. You can set *output-encoding* manually to override this. For other input encodings, the *output-encoding* option will automatically be set to the the same value. Regardless of the preset value, you can set *output-encoding* manually to override this. Tidy is not an encoding converter. Although the Latin and UTF encodings can be mixed freely, it is not possible to convert Asian encodings to Latin encodings with Tidy. See also: **--input-encoding**, **--output-encoding** - **--input-encoding** *Encoding* (**utf8** if unset) Supported values: **raw, ascii, latin0, latin1, utf8, iso2022, mac, win1252, ibm858, utf16le, utf16be, utf16, big5, shiftjis** This option specifies the character encoding Tidy uses for input. Tidy makes certain assumptions about some of the input encodings. For **ascii**, Tidy will accept Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) character values and convert them to entities as necessary. For **raw**, Tidy will make no assumptions about the character values and will pass them unchanged to output. For **mac** and **win1252**, vendor specific characters values will be accepted and converted to entities as necessary. Asian encodings such as **iso2022** will be handled appropriately assuming the corresponding *output-encoding* is also specified. Tidy is not an encoding converter. Although the Latin and UTF encodings can be mixed freely, it is not possible to convert Asian encodings to Latin encodings with Tidy. See also: **--char-encoding** - **--newline** *Enum* (**LF** if unset) Supported values: **LF, CRLF, CR** The default is appropriate to the current platform. Genrally **CRLF** on PC-DOS, Windows and OS/2; **CR** on Classic Mac OS; and **LF** everywhere else (Linux, macOS, and Unix). - **--output-bom** *Enum* (**auto** if unset) Supported values: **no, yes, auto** This option specifies if Tidy should write a Unicode Byte Order Mark character (BOM; also known as Zero Width No-Break Space; has value of U+FEFF) to the beginning of the output, and only applies to UTF-8 and UTF-16 output encodings. If set to **auto** this option causes Tidy to write a BOM to the output only if a BOM was present at the beginning of the input. A BOM is always written for XML/XHTML output using UTF-16 output encodings. - **--output-encoding** *Encoding* (**utf8** if unset) Supported values: **raw, ascii, latin0, latin1, utf8, iso2022, mac, win1252, ibm858, utf16le, utf16be, utf16, big5, shiftjis** This option specifies the character encoding Tidy uses for output. Some of the output encodings affect whether or not some characters are translated to entities, although in all cases, some entities will be written according to other Tidy configuration options. For **ascii**, **mac**, and **win1252** output encodings, entities will be used for all characters with values over 127. For **raw** output, Tidy will write values above 127 without translating them to entities. Output using **latin1** will cause Tidy to write character values higher than 255 as entities. The UTF family such as **utf8** will write output in the respective UTF encoding. Asian output encodings such as **iso2022** will write output in the specified encoding, assuming a corresponding *input-encoding* was specified. Tidy is not an encoding converter. Although the Latin and UTF encodings can be mixed freely, it is not possible to convert Asian encodings to Latin encodings with Tidy. See also: **--char-encoding** ### Cleanup options - **--bare** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should replace smart quotes and em dashes with ASCII, and output spaces rather than non-breaking spaces, where they exist in the input. - **--clean** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should perform cleaning of some legacy presentational tags (currently *\*, *\*, *\* when enclosed within appropriate inline tags, and *\*). If set to **yes**, then the legacy tags will be replaced with CSS *\* tags and structural markup as appropriate. - **--drop-empty-elements** *Boolean* (**yes** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should discard empty elements. - **--drop-empty-paras** *Boolean* (**yes** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should discard empty paragraphs. - **--drop-proprietary-attributes** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should strip out proprietary attributes, such as Microsoft data binding attributes. Additionally attributes that aren't permitted in the output version of HTML will be dropped if used with *strict-tags-attributes*. - **--gdoc** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should enable specific behavior for cleaning up HTML exported from Google Docs. - **--logical-emphasis** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should replace any occurrence of *\* with *\* and any occurrence of *\* with *\*. Any attributes are preserved unchanged. This option can be set independently of the *clean* option. - **--merge-divs** *Enum* (**auto** if unset) Supported values: **no, yes, auto** This option can be used to modify the behavior of *clean* when set to **yes**. This option specifies if Tidy should merge nested *\* such as *\\...\\*. If set to **auto** the attributes of the inner *\* are moved to the outer one. Nested *\* with *id* attributes are *not* merged. If set to **yes** the attributes of the inner *\* are discarded with the exception of *class* and *style*. See also: **--clean**, **--merge-spans** - **--merge-spans** *Enum* (**auto** if unset) Supported values: **no, yes, auto** This option can be used to modify the behavior of *clean* when set to **yes**. This option specifies if Tidy should merge nested *\* such as *\\...\\*. The algorithm is identical to the one used by *merge-divs*. See also: **--clean**, **--merge-divs** - **--word-2000** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should go to great pains to strip out all the surplus stuff Microsoft Word 2000 inserts when you save Word documents as "Web pages". It doesn't handle embedded images or VML. You should consider saving using Word's **Save As...**, and choosing **Web Page, Filtered**. ### Entities options - **--ascii-chars** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) Can be used to modify behavior of the *clean* option when set to **yes**. If set to **yes** when using *clean*, *&emdash;*, *”*, and other named character entities are downgraded to their closest ASCII equivalents. See also: **--clean** - **--ncr** *Boolean* (**yes** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should allow numeric character references. - **--numeric-entities** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should output entities other than the built-in HTML entities (*&*, *<*, *>*, and *"*) in the numeric rather than the named entity form. Only entities compatible with the DOCTYPE declaration generated are used. Entities that can be represented in the output encoding are translated correspondingly. See also: **--doctype**, **--preserve-entities** - **--preserve-entities** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should preserve well-formed entities as found in the input. - **--quote-ampersand** *Boolean* (**yes** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should output unadorned *&* characters as *&*, in legacy doctypes only. - **--quote-marks** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should output *"* characters as *"* as is preferred by some editing environments. The apostrophe character *'* is written out as *'* since many web browsers don't yet support *'*. - **--quote-nbsp** *Boolean* (**yes** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should output non-breaking space characters as entities, rather than as the Unicode character value 160 (decimal). ### Repair options - **--alt-text** *String* This option specifies the default *alt=* text Tidy uses for *\* attributes when the *alt=* attribute is missing. Use with care, as it is your responsibility to make your documents accessible to people who cannot see the images. - **--anchor-as-name** *Boolean* (**yes** if unset) This option controls the deletion or addition of the *name* attribute in elements where it can serve as anchor. If set to **yes** a *name* attribute, if not already existing, is added along an existing *id* attribute if the DTD allows it. If set to **no** any existing name attribute is removed if an *id* attribute exists or has been added. - **--assume-xml-procins** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should change the parsing of processing instructions to require *?\>* as the terminator rather than *\>*. This option is automatically set if the input is in XML. - **--coerce-endtags** *Boolean* (**yes** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should coerce a start tag into an end tag in cases where it looks like an end tag was probably intended; for example, given *\foo \bar\ baz\* Tidy will output *\foo \bar\ baz\* - **--css-prefix** *String* (**c** if unset) This option specifies the prefix that Tidy uses for styles rules. By default, **c** will be used. - **--custom-tags** *Enum* (**no** if unset) Supported values: **no, blocklevel, empty, inline, pre** This option enables the use of tags for autonomous custom elements, e.g. *\* with Tidy. Custom tags are disabled if this value is **no**. Other settings - **blocklevel**, **empty**, **inline**, and **pre** will treat *all* detected custom tags accordingly. The use of *new-blocklevel-tags*, *new-empty-tags*, *new-inline-tags*, or *new-pre-tags* will override the treatment of custom tags by this configuration option. This may be useful if you have different types of custom tags. When enabled these tags are determined during the processing of your document using opening tags; matching closing tags will be recognized accordingly, and unknown closing tags will be discarded. See also: **--new-blocklevel-tags**, **--new-empty-tags**, **--new-inline-tags**, **--new-pre-tags** - **--enclose-block-text** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should insert a *\* element to enclose any text it finds in any element that allows mixed content for HTML transitional but not HTML strict. - **--enclose-text** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should enclose any text it finds in the body element within a *\* element. This is useful when you want to take existing HTML and use it with a style sheet. - **--escape-scripts** *Boolean* (**yes** if unset) This option causes items that look like closing tags, like *\* elements with some CSS markup to avoid indentation to the right. - **--escape-cdata** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should convert *\* sections to normal text. - **--hide-comments** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should not print out comments. - **--join-classes** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should combine class names to generate a single, new class name if multiple class assignments are detected on an element. - **--join-styles** *Boolean* (**yes** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should combine styles to generate a single, new style if multiple style values are detected on an element. - **--merge-emphasis** *Boolean* (**yes** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should merge nested *\* and *\* elements; for example, for the case *\foo \bar\ baz\*, Tidy will output *\foo bar baz\*. - **--replace-color** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should replace numeric values in color attributes with HTML/XHTML color names where defined, e.g. replace *#ffffff* with *white*. ### Teaching Tidy options - **--new-blocklevel-tags** *Tag Names* Supported values: **tagX, tagY, ...** This option specifies new block-level tags. This option takes a space or comma separated list of tag names. Unless you declare new tags, Tidy will refuse to generate a tidied file if the input includes previously unknown tags. Note you can't change the content model for elements such as *\*, *\*, *\* and *\*. This option is ignored in XML mode. See also: **--new-empty-tags**, **--new-inline-tags**, **--new-pre-tags**, **--custom-tags** - **--new-empty-tags** *Tag Names* Supported values: **tagX, tagY, ...** This option specifies new empty inline tags. This option takes a space or comma separated list of tag names. Unless you declare new tags, Tidy will refuse to generate a tidied file if the input includes previously unknown tags. Remember to also declare empty tags as either inline or blocklevel. This option is ignored in XML mode. See also: **--new-blocklevel-tags**, **--new-inline-tags**, **--new-pre-tags**, **--custom-tags** - **--new-inline-tags** *Tag Names* Supported values: **tagX, tagY, ...** This option specifies new non-empty inline tags. This option takes a space or comma separated list of tag names. Unless you declare new tags, Tidy will refuse to generate a tidied file if the input includes previously unknown tags. This option is ignored in XML mode. See also: **--new-blocklevel-tags**, **--new-empty-tags**, **--new-pre-tags**, **--custom-tags** - **--new-pre-tags** *Tag Names* Supported values: **tagX, tagY, ...** This option specifies new tags that are to be processed in exactly the same way as HTML's *\* element. This option takes a space or comma separated list of tag names. Unless you declare new tags, Tidy will refuse to generate a tidied file if the input includes previously unknown tags. Note you cannot as yet add new CDATA elements. This option is ignored in XML mode. See also: **--new-blocklevel-tags**, **--new-empty-tags**, **--new-inline-tags**, **--custom-tags** ### Pretty Print options - **--break-before-br** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should output a line break before each *\* element. - **--indent** *Enum* (**no** if unset) Supported values: **no, yes, auto** This option specifies if Tidy should indent block-level tags. If set to **auto** Tidy will decide whether or not to indent the content of tags such as *\*, *\*-*\*, *\*, *\*, or *\* based on the content including a block-level element. Setting *indent* to **yes** can expose layout bugs in some browsers. Use the option *indent-spaces* to control the number of spaces or tabs output per level of indent, and *indent-with-tabs* to specify whether spaces or tabs are used. See also: **--indent-spaces** - **--indent-attributes** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should begin each attribute on a new line. - **--indent-cdata** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should indent *\* sections. - **--indent-spaces** *Integer* (**2** if unset) This option specifies the number of spaces or tabs that Tidy uses to indent content when *indent* is enabled. Note that the default value for this option is dependent upon the value of *indent-with-tabs* (see also). See also: **--indent** - **--indent-with-tabs** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should indent with tabs instead of spaces, assuming *indent* is **yes**. Set it to **yes** to indent using tabs instead of the default spaces. Use the option *indent-spaces* to control the number of tabs output per level of indent. Note that when *indent-with-tabs* is enabled the default value of *indent-spaces* is reset to **1**. Note *tab-size* controls converting input tabs to spaces. Set it to zero to retain input tabs. - **--keep-tabs** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) With the default **no** Tidy will replace all source tabs with spaces, controlled by the option *tab-size*, and the current line offset. Of course, except in the special blocks/elements enumerated below, this will later be reduced to just one space. If set **yes** this option specifies Tidy should keep certain tabs found in the source, but only in preformatted blocks like *\*, and other CDATA elements like *\*, *\*, and other pseudo elements like *\*. As always, all other tabs, or sequences of tabs, in the source will continue to be replaced with a space. - **--omit-optional-tags** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should omit optional start tags and end tags when generating output. Setting this option causes all tags for the *\*, *\*, and *\* elements to be omitted from output, as well as such end tags as *\*, *\*, *\*, *\*, *\*, *\*, *\*, and *\*. This option is ignored for XML output. - **--priority-attributes** *Attributes Names* Supported values: **attributeX, attributeY, ...** This option allows prioritizing the writing of attributes in tidied documents, allowing them to written before the other attributes of an element. For example, you might specify that **id** and **name** are written before every other attribute. This option takes a space or comma separated list of attribute names. - **--punctuation-wrap** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should line wrap after some Unicode or Chinese punctuation characters. - **--sort-attributes** *Enum* (**none** if unset) Supported values: **none, alpha** This option specifies that Tidy should sort attributes within an element using the specified sort algorithm. If set to **alpha**, the algorithm is an ascending alphabetic sort. When used while sorting with *priority-attributes*, any attribute sorting will take place after the priority attributes have been output. See also: **--priority-attributes** - **--tab-size** *Integer* (**8** if unset) This option specifies the number of columns that Tidy uses between successive tab stops. It is used to map tabs to spaces when reading the input. - **--tidy-mark** *Boolean* (**yes** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should add a *meta* element to the document head to indicate that the document has been tidied. Tidy won't add a meta element if one is already present. - **--vertical-space** *Enum* (**no** if unset) Supported values: **no, yes, auto** This option specifies if Tidy should add some extra empty lines for readability. The default is **no**. If set to **auto** Tidy will eliminate nearly all newline characters. - **--wrap** *Integer* (**68** if unset) This option specifies the right margin Tidy uses for line wrapping. Tidy tries to wrap lines so that they do not exceed this length. Set *wrap* to **0** (zero) if you want to disable line wrapping. - **--wrap-asp** *Boolean* (**yes** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should line wrap text contained within ASP pseudo elements, which look like: *\<% ... %\>*. - **--wrap-attributes** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should line-wrap attribute values, meaning that if the value of an attribute causes a line to exceed the width specified by *wrap*, Tidy will add one or more line breaks to the value, causing it to be wrapped into multiple lines. Note that this option can be set independently of *wrap-script-literals*. By default Tidy replaces any newline or tab with a single space and replaces any sequences of whitespace with a single space. To force Tidy to preserve the original, literal values of all attributes, and ensure that whitespace characters within attribute values are passed through unchanged, set *literal-attributes* to **yes**. See also: **--wrap-script-literals**, **--literal-attributes** - **--wrap-jste** *Boolean* (**yes** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should line wrap text contained within JSTE pseudo elements, which look like: *\<# ... #\>*. - **--wrap-php** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should add a new line after a PHP pseudo elements, which look like: *\*. - **--wrap-script-literals** *Boolean* (**no** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should line wrap string literals that appear in script attributes. Tidy wraps long script string literals by inserting a backslash character before the line break. See also: **--wrap-attributes** - **--wrap-sections** *Boolean* (**yes** if unset) This option specifies if Tidy should line wrap text contained within *\* section tags. ## ENVIRONMENT - **HTML\_TIDY** Name of the default configuration file. This should be an absolute path, since you will probably invoke **tidy** from different directories. The value of HTML\_TIDY will be parsed after the compiled-in default (defined with -DTIDY\_CONFIG\_FILE), but before any of the files specified using **-config**. - **RUNTIME CONFIGURATION FILES** You can also specify runtime configuration files from which **tidy** will attempt to load a configuration automatically. - The system runtime configuration file (/etc/tidy.conf), if it exists will be loaded and applied first, followed by the user runtime configuration file (~/.tidyrc). Subsequent usage of a specific option will override any previous usage. - Note that if you use the **HTML\_TIDY** environment variable, then the user runtime configuration file will not be used. This is a feature, not a bug. ## EXIT STATUS - 0 All input files were processed successfully. - 1 There were warnings. - 2 There were errors. ## SEE ALSO For more information about HTML Tidy: http://www.html-tidy.org/ For more information on HTML: **HTML: Edition for Web Authors** (the latest HTML specification)\ http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-author-view **HTML: The Markup Language** (an HTML language reference)\ http://dev.w3.org/html5/markup/ For bug reports and comments: https://github.com/htacg/tidy-html5/issues/ Or send questions and comments to **public-htacg@w3.org**. Validate your HTML documents using the **W3C Nu Markup Validator**: http://validator.w3.org/nu/ ## AUTHOR **Tidy** was written by **Dave Raggett** \, and subsequently maintained by a team at http://tidy.sourceforge.net/, and now maintained by **HTACG** (http://www.htacg.org). The sources for **HTML Tidy** are available at https://github.com/htacg/tidy-html5/ under the MIT Licence.