icon Clean up your Web pages
with HTML TIDY
This version 27th September 1999
Copyright © 1999 W3C, see tidy.c for copyright notice.
With many thanks to Hewlett Packard for financial support during
the development of this software!
________________________________________________________
How to use Tidy | Downloading Tidy | Release Notes
Integration with other Software | Acknowledgements
________________________________________________________
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.
Press Here to Register
The public email list devoted to HTML Tidy is: <[email protected]>. To
subscribe send an email to [email protected] with the word
subscribe in the subject line (include the word unsubscribe if you
want to unsubscribe). The archive for this list is accessible online.
Please use this list to report errors or enhancement requests. See the
release notes for information on recent changes. Your feedback is
welcome!
If you find HTML Tidy useful and you would like to say thanks, then
please send me a postcard or other souvenir from the area in which you
live along with a few words on what you are using Tidy for. It will be
fun to map out where Tidy users are to be found! Here is my postal
address.
Support for Word2000
Tidy can now perform wonders on HTML saved from Microsoft Word 2000!
Word bulks out HTML files with stuff for round-tripping presentation
between HTML and Word. If you are more concerned about using HTML on
the Web, check out Tidy's new "word-2000" config option!
Introduction to TIDY
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 features in a recent article on XHTML by webreview.com.
Examples of TIDY at work
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:
* Missing or mismatched end tags are detected and corrected
<h1>heading
<h2>subheading</h3>
is mapped to
<h1>heading</h1>
<h2>subheading</h2>
* End tags in the wrong order are corrected:
<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?
* Fixes problems with heading emphasis
<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
* Recovers from mixed up tags
<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>
* Getting the <hr> in the right place:
<h1><hr>heading</h1>
<h2>sub<hr>heading</h2>
Tidy maps this to
<hr>
<h1>heading</h1>
<h2>sub</h2>
<hr>
<h2>heading</h2>
* Adding the missing "/" in end tags for anchors:
<a href="#refs">References<a>
Tidy maps this to
<a href="#refs">References</a>
* Perfecting lists by putting in tags missed out:
<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>
* Missing quotes around attribute values are added
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.
* Unknown/Proprietary attributes are reported
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.
* Proprietary elements are recognized and reported as such.
Tidy will even work out which version of HTML you are using and
insert the appropriate DOCTYPE element, as per the W3C
recommendations.
* Tags lacking a terminating '>' are spotted
This is something you then have to fix yourself as Tidy is unsure
of where the > should be inserted.
Layout style
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. Several people have asked if Tidy could
preserve the original layout. I am sorry to say that this would be
very hard to support due to the way Tidy is implemented. Tidy starts
by building a clean parse tree from the source file. The parse tree
doesn't contain any information about the original layout. Tidy then
pretty prints the parse tree using the current layout options. Trying
to preserve the original layout would interact badly with the repair
operations needed to build a clean parse tree and considerably
complicate the code.
Some browsers can screw up the right alignment of text depending on
how you layout headings. As an example, consider: <h1 align="right">
Heading </h1>
<h1 align="right">Heading</h1>
Both of these should be rendered the same. Sadly a common browser bug
fails to trim trailing whitespace and misaligns the first heading.
HTML Tidy will protect you from this bug, except when you set the
indent option to "yes".
Setting the indent option to yes can also cause problems with table
layout for some browsers: <td><img src="foo.gif"></td> <td><img src="foo.gif"></td>
will look slightly different from: <td>
<img src="foo.gif"> </td> <td>
<img src="foo.gif"> </td>
You can avoid such quirks by using indent: no or indent: auto in the
config file.
Internationalization issues
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 defaults to assuming you want the output to be in US ASCII. Tidy
doesn't yet recognize the use of the HTML meta element for specifying
the character encoding.
Accessibility
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.
Cleaning up presentational markup
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.
Some pages rely on the presentation effects of isolated <p> or </p>
tags.Tidy deletes empty paragraph and heading elements etc. The use of
empty paragraph elements is not recommended for adding vertical
whitespace. Instead use style sheets, or the <br> element. Tidy won't
discard paragraphs only containing a nonbreaking space
Teaching Tidy about new tags!
You can teach Tidy about new tags by declaring them in the
configuration file, the syntax is:
new-inline-tags: tag1, tag2, tag3
new-empty-tags: tag1, tag2, tag3
new-blocklevel-tags: tag1, tag2, tag3
The same tag can be defined as empty and as inline or as empty and as
block.
These declarations can be combined to define an a new empty inline or
empty block element, but you are not advised to declare tags as being
both inline and block!
Note that the new tags can only appear where Tidy expects inline or
block-level tags respectively. This means you can't (yet) place new
tags within the document head or other contexts with restricted
content models. So far the most popular use of this feature is to
allow Tidy to be applied to Cold Fusion files.
I am working on ways to make it easy to customize the permitted
document syntax using assertion grammars, and hope to apply this to a
much smarter version of Tidy for release later this year or early next
year.
Limited support for ASP and PHP
Tidy is somewhat aware of the preprocessing language called ASP which
uses a pseudo element syntax <% ... %> to include preprocessor
directives. ASP is normally interpreted by the web server before
delivery to the browser. Tidy can also cope with another such language
called PHP, which uses the syntax <?php ... ?>
Tidy will cope with ASP and PHP pseudo elements within element content
and as replacements for attributes, for example:
<option <% if rsSchool.Fields("ID").Value
= session("sessSchoolID")
then Response.Write("selected") %>
value='<%=rsSchool.Fields("ID").Value%>'>
<%=rsSchool.Fields("Name").Value%>
(<%=rsSchool.Fields("ID").Value%>)
</option>
Note that Tidy doesn't understand the scripting language used within
ASP, and can easily get confused. Tidy may report missing attributes
when these are hidden within ASP code. Tidy can also get things wrong
if the ASP code includes quote marks, e.g. if the example above is
changed to:
value="<%=rsSchool.Fields("ID").Value%>"
Tidy will now see the quote mark preceding ID as ending the attribute
value, and proceed to complain about what follows. Note you can choose
whether to allow line wrapping on spaces within ASP pseudo elements or
not using the wrap-asp option. If you used ASP or PHP to create a
start tag, but placed the end tag explicitly in the markup, Tidy won't
be able to match them up, and will delete the end tag for you. So in
this case you are advise to make the start tag explicit and to use ASP
or PHP for just the attributes, e.g.
<a href="<%=random.site()%>">do you feel lucky?</a>
Tidy allows you to control whether line wrapping is enabled for ASP
and PHP instructions, see the wrap-asp and wrap-php config options,
respectively.
I regret that Tidy does not support Tango preprocessing instructions
which look like: <@if variable_1='a'>
do something <@else>
do nothing </@if>
<@include <@cgi><@appfilepath>includes/message.html>
Adding support for Tango looks as if it will be quite tough, so I
would like to gauge the level of interest before committing to this
work. Note that you can use Tango for attribute values.
Limited support for XML
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 understand CDATA
sections or DTD subsets.
Creating Slides
The -slides option allows you to burst a single HTML file into a
number of linked slides. Each H2 element in the input file is treated
as delimiting the start of the next slide. The slides are named
slide1.html, slide2.html, slide3.html etc. This is a relatively new
feature and ideas are welcomed as to how to improve it. In particular,
I plan to add support to the configuration file for setting the style
sheet for slides and for customizing the slides via a template.
I would be interested in hearing from anyone who can offer help with
using Javascript for adding dynamic effects to slides, for instance
similar to those available in Microsoft PowerPoint.
Indenting text for a better layout
Indenting the content of elements makes the markup easier to read.
Tidy can do this for all elements or just for those where it's needed.
The auto-indent mode has been used below to avoid indenting the
content of title, p and li elements: <html>
<head>
<title>Test document</title>
</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>
Indenting the content does increase the size of the file, so you may
prefer Tidy's default style:
<html>
<head>
<title>Test document</title>
</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>
How to run tidy
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!
Users running in Microsoft Windows should be aware that Dos doesn't
expand wild cards in filenames. This means that if you have several
html files in the same directory and want to tidy all of them:
tidy *.html
won't work. You will see an error message: "can't open file *.html".
Instead you need to run tidy separately on each one. I will look into
a fix for this for a future release. A work around is to use the DOS
for command, as in:
for %i in (*.html) do tidy %i
Note: in a batch file that needs to be %%i instead of %i
Tidy writes errors to stderr, and won't be paused by the more command.
A work around is to redirect stderr to stdout as follows. This works
on Unix and Windows NT, but not on other platforms. My thanks to
Markus Wolf for this tip!
tidy file.html 2>&1 | more
Tidy's Options
To get a list of available options use:
tidy -help
You should see something like this:
options for tidy vers: 14th April 1999
-config file read config file
-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 (default is lower)
-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
-quiet or -q suppress non-essential output
-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 h2 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
Using a Configuration File
Tidy now supports a configuration file, and this is now much the most
convenient way to configure Tidy. Assuming you have created a config
file named "config.txt" (the name doesn't matter), you can instruct
Tidy to use it via the command line option -config config.txt, e.g.
tidy -config config.txt file1.html file2.html
Alternatively, you can name the default config file via the
environment variable named "HTML_TIDY". Note this should be the
absolute path since you are likely to want to run Tidy in different
directories. You can also set a config file at compile time by
defining CONFIG_FILE as the path string, see platform.h.
You can now set config options on the command line by preceding the
name of the option immediately (no intervening space) by "--", for
example:
tidy --break-before-br true --show-warnings false
The following options are supported:
markup: bool
Determines whether Tidy generates a pretty printed version of
the markup. Bool values are either yes or no. Note that Tidy
won't generate a pretty printed version if it finds unknown
tags, or missing trailing quotes on attribute values, or
missing trailing '>' on tags. The default is no.
wrap: number
Sets the right margin for line wrapping. Tidy tries to wrap
lines so that they do not exceed this length. The default is
66.
tab-size: number
Sets the number of columns between successive tab stops. The
default is 4. It is used to map tabs to spaces when reading
files. Tidy never outputs files with tabs.
indent: no, yes or auto
If set to yes Tidy will indent block-level tags. The default is
no. If set to auto Tidy will decide whether or not to indent
the content of tags such as title, h1-h6, li, td, th, or p
depending on whether or not the content includes a block-level
element.
indent-spaces: number
Sets the number of spaces to indent content when indentation is
enabled. The default is 2 spaces.
indent-attributes: bool
If set to yes, each attribute will begin on a new line. The
default is no.
hide-endtags: bool
If set to yes, optional end-tags will be omitted when
generating the pretty printed markup. This option is ignored if
you are outputting to XML. The default is no.
input-xml: bool
If set to yes, Tidy will use the XML parser rather than the
error correcting HTML parser. The default is no.
output-xml: bool
If set to yes, Tidy will use generate the pretty printed 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 tags and attributes will be in the
case used in the input document, regardless of other options.
The default is no.
add-xml-pi: bool
If set to yes, Tidy will use add the XML processing instruction
when outputting XML or XHTML. The default is yes. Note that if
the input document includes an XML PI, then it will appear in
the output independent of the value of this option.
output-xhtml: bool
If set to yes, Tidy will use generate the pretty printed output
writing it as extensible HTML. The default is no. This option
causes Tidy to set the doctype and default namespace as
appropriate to XHTML. If a doctype or namespace is given they
will checked for consistency with the content of the document.
In the case of an inconsistency, the corrected values will
appear in the output. For XHTML, entities can be written as
named or numeric entities according to the value of the
"numeric-entities" property. he tags and attributes will be
output in the case used in the input document, regardless of
other options.
doctype: omit, auto, strict, loose or <fpi>
This property controls the doctype declaration generated by
Tidy. If set to omit the output file won't contain a doctype
declaration. If set to auto (the default) Tidy will use an
educated guess based upon the contents of the document. If set
to strict, Tidy will set the doctype to the strict DTD. If set
to loose, the doctype is set to the 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 the empty string. Tidy leaves the document
type for generic XML documents unchanged.
char-encoding: raw, ascii, latin1, utf8 or iso2022
Determines how Tidy interprets character streams. For ascii,
Tidy will accept Latin-1 character values, but will use
entities for all characters whose value > 127. For raw, Tidy
will output values above 127 without translating them into
entities. For latin1 characters above 255 will be written as
entities. For utf8, Tidy assumes that both input and output is
encoded as UTF-8. You can use iso2022 for files encoded using
the ISO2022 family of encodings e.g. ISO 2022-JP. The default
is ascii
numeric-entities: bool
Causes entities other than the basic XML 1.0 named entities to
be written in the numeric rather than the named entity form.
The default is no
quote-marks: bool
If set to yes, this causes " characters to be written out as
" as is preferred by some editing environments. The
apostrophe character ' is written out as ' since many web
browsers don't yet support '. The default is no.
quote-nbsp: bool
If set, this causes non-breaking space characters to be written
out as entities. The default is yes.
quote-ampersand: bool
If set to yes, this causes unadorned & characters to be written
out as &. The default is yes.
assume-xml-procins: bool
If set to yes, this changes the parsing of processing
instructions to require ?> as the terminator rather than >. The
default is no. This option is automatically set if the input is
in XML.
fix-backslash: bool
If set to yes, this causes backslash characters "
be replaced by forward slashes "/". The default is yes.
wrap-script-literals: bool
If set to yes, this allows lines to be wrapped within string
literals that appear in script attributes. The default is no.
The example shows how Tidy wraps a really really long script
string literal inserting a backslash character before the
linebreak:
<a href="somewhere.html" onmouseover="document.status = '...some really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really long string..';">test</a>
wrap-asp: bool
If set to no, this prevents lines from being wrapped within ASP
pseudo elements. The default is yes.
wrap-php: bool
If set to no, this prevents lines from being wrapped within PHP
pseudo elements. The default is yes.
break-before-br: bool
If set, Tidy will output a line break before each <br> element.
The default is no.
uppercase-tags: bool
Causes tag names to be output in upper case. The default is no
resulting in lowercase, except for XML input where the original
case is preserved.
uppercase-attributes: bool
Causes attribute names to be output in upper case. The default
is no resulting in lowercase, except for XML where the original
case is preserved.
word-2000: bool
If set, Tidy will go to great pains to strip out all the
surplus stuff Microsoft Word 2000 inserts when you save Word
documents as "Web pages". The default is no. Note that Tidy
doesn't yet know what to do with VML markup from Word.
clean: bool
If set, causes Tidy to strip out surplus presentational tags
and attributes replacing them by style rules and structural
markup as appropriate. It works well on the html saved from
Microsoft Office'97. The default is no.
logical-emphasis: bool
If set, causes Tidy to replace any occurrence of i by em and
any occurrence of b by strong. In both cases, the attributes
are preserved unchanged. The default is no. When set to yes,
this option automatically sets the clean option.
drop-font-tags: bool
If set together with the clean option (see above), Tidy will
discard font and center tags rather than creating the
corresponding style rules. The default is no.
enclose-text: bool
If set, this causes Tidy to enclose any text it finds in the
body element within a p element. This is useful when you want
to take an existing html file and use it with a style sheet.
Any text at the body level will screw up the margins, but wrap
the text within a p element and all is well! The default is no.
write-back: bool
If set, Tidy will write back the tidied markup to the same file
it read from. The default is no. You are advised to keep copies
of important files before tidying them as on rare occasions the
result may not always be what you expect.
keep-time: bool
If set, Tidy won't alter the last modified time for files it
writes back to. The default is yes. This allows you to tidy
files without effecting which ones will be uploaded to the Web
server when using a tool such as 'SiteCopy'.
error-file: filename
Writes errors and warnings to the named file rather than to
stderr.
show-warnings: bool
If set to no, warnings are suppressed. This can be useful when
a few errors are hidden in a flurry of warnings. The default is
yes.
quiet: bool
If set to yes, Tidy won't output the welcome message or the
summary of the numbers of errors and warnings. The default is
no.
split: bool
If set to yes Tidy will use the input file to create a sequence
of slides, splitting the markup prior to each successive <h2>.
You can see an example of the results in a recent talk I made
on XHTML. The slides are written to "slide1.html",
"slide2.html" etc. The default is no.
new-empty-tags: tag1, tag2, tag3
Use this to declare new empty inline tags. The 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.
new-inline-tags: tag1, tag2, tag3
Use this to declare new non-empty inline tags. The 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
new-blocklevel-tags: tag1, tag2, tag3
Use this to declare new block-level tags. The 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 as yet
add new empty elements (similar to hr) and you can't change the
content model for elements such as table, ul, ol and dl. This
is explained in more detail in the release notes
Sample Config File
This is just an example to get you started. // sample config file for HTML tidy indent: auto indent-spaces: 2 wrap: 72 markup: yes clean: yes output-xml: no input-xml: no show-warnings: yes numeric-entities: yes quote-marks: yes quote-nbsp: yes quote-ampersand: no break-before-br: no uppercase-tags: no uppercase-attributes: no output-xhtml: yes char-encoding: latin1
Using Tidy from scripts
If you want to run Tidy from a Perl or other scripting language you
may find it of value to inspect the result returned by Tidy when it
exits: 0 if everything is fine, 1 if there were warnings and 2 if
there were errors. This is an example using Perl: if (close(TIDY) == 0) {
my $exitcode = $? >> 8;
if ($exitcode == 1) {
printf STDERR "tidy issued warning messages0;
} elsif ($exitcode == 2) {
printf STDERR "tidy issued error messages0;
} else {
die "tidy exited with code: $exitcode0;
} } else {
printf STDERR "tidy detected no errors0; }
Downloadable Binaries
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
whenever you recompile.
Windows users! A free graphical user interface (HTML-Kit) for HTML
Tidy is now available for windows 95/98/NT. Alternatively, you can get
tidy in its native form as a Windows (win32) console program:
tidy.exe, with the command options as per above. A version of Tidy
for Windows 3.11 is in preparation.
Mac users! You can now run HTML Tidy as a standalone Macintosh
application with a graphical user interface, or as a FilterTop filter
( Screenshot). My thanks to Terry Teague for this port.
Amiga users! Keith Blakemore-Noble has compiled Tidy for the Amiga.
AIX executable for Tidy! Compiled by Ciaran Deignan. The link is to a
general download page. The executable is available for AIX 4.3.2 and
later.
Tidy RPM Package for Redhat Linux, maintained by Dimitri Papadopoulos.
Tidy may also be available from other Linux distribution sites, e.g.
http://rpmfind.net/, and http://www.fte.dk/~mbn/tidy/ which offers
two versions one Danish, and one English, thanks to Morten Blinksbjerg
Nielsen.
Tidy for UnixWare! Simon Trimmer is maintaining a Tidy binary for
Unixware.
Tidy386 for DOS, maintained by Nick B. This exploits the DPMI
mechanism for the memory management.
Integrating Tidy as part of other Software
You can also incorporate Tidy as part of a larger program, for
instance in HTML editors or HTML transformation tools used for import
filters, or for when you want to customize Web content to get the best
out of different kinds of browsers. Imagine authoring clean HTML with
CSS and at a touch of a button producing variants that look great and
work reliably on a large variety of different browsers, taking into
account the quirks of each. For instance, providing the ability to
tune content for different versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer,
and for browsers running on set-top boxes for televisions, handheld
and palmtop devices, cell phones, and voice browsers. I am happy to
quote for software development for such tools.
Java port of HTML Tidy
Andy Quick has ported Tidy to Java, so that you can now integrate Tidy
into your Java applications. More information is available on Andy's
home page. Andy writes:
It uses some nice features of Java, such as resource bundles (for
internationalization). The current state of the project is: I have
ran a few simple tests, and it seems to work. In other words, it is
beta software :-) I still have to implement the clean functionality
(from clean.c) and do a lot more testing. I would be willing to
bring the Java version to a stable version. After that, I may be
interested in supporting it, but I could at least pass it on to
somebody who is interested in supporting it.
Implementation details
The code is in ANSI C and uses the C standard library for i/o. 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'98, Windows NT, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Ultrix,
OSF, OS/MP, IRIX, NeXtStep, MacOS, BeOS, OS2, AIX, Amiga, SunOS,
Solaris, IRIX and HP-UX, amongst others.
tidy27sep99.tgz
gzipped tar file for source code (Unix line ends)
tidy27sep99.zip
zipped source code (Windows line ends)
tidy.exe
Windows 95/98/2000/NT executable (32-bit Windows console-mode
program)
tidy17dec98.ppc.tgz
Gzipped archive of the binary for BeOS PPC R4. It also contains
complete tidy distribution and Makefile.BeOS file for BeOS
(from 17dec98 release of tidy).
Tidy on OS/2
An OS/2 release of tidy, as compiled by Kaz SHiMZ
<[email protected]>
platform.h, html.h
the include files with common definitions
config.c
support for customizing Tidy via config files
lexer.c
lexical analysis and buffer management
parser.c
HTML and XML parsers
tags.c
dictionary of tags and their properties
attrs.c
dictionary of attributes and their properties
istack.c
stack of active inline elements
entities.c
dictionary of entities
clean.c
smarts for cleaning up presentational markup
pprint.c
pretty printing for HTML and XML
localize.c
Change this file to localize tidy's messages
tidy.c
main() and error reporting routines
Makefile
Makefile for gcc
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 ' 15' < $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"
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the many people who have written to me with
suggestions for improvements or reporting bugs. Your help has been
invaluable.
Drew Adams, Osma Ahvenlampi, Carsten Allefeld, Richard Allsebrook,
Jacob Sparre Andersen, Joe D'Andrea, Jerry Andrews, Bruce Aron,
Edward Avis, Nick B, Chang Hyun Baek, Nick B, Chuck Baslock,
Christer Bernerus, Yu Jian Bin, Alexander Biron, Keith
Blakemore-Noble, Eric Blossom, ochen M. Braun, David Brooke, Andy
Brown, Keith B. Brown, Andreas Buchholz, Maurice Buxton, Jelks
Cabaniss, Trevor Carden, Terry Cassidy, Mathew Cepl, Kendall Clark,
Rob Clark, Jeremy Clulow, Dan Connolly, Ken Cox, John Cumming,
Keith Davies, Ciaran Deignan, Tamminen Eero, Bodo Eing, Baruch
Even, David Fallon, Claus André Färber, Stephanie Foott, Darren
Forcier, Frederik Fouvry, Rene Fritz, Martin Gallwey, Francisco
Guardiola, David Getchell, Michael Giroux, Guus Goos, Léa Gris,
Juha Häikiö, Vlad Harchev, Bjoern Hoehrmann, G. Ken Holman, Bill
Homer, Craig Horman, Jack Horsfield, Marc Jauvin, Rick Jelliffe,
Peter Jeremy, Craig Johnson, Charles LaFountain, Steven Lobo,
Zdenek Kabelac, Michael Kay, Axel Kielhorn, Johannes Koch, Rudy
Kohut, Allan Kuchinsky, Volker Kuhlmann, Michael LaStella, Steve
Lee, Tony Leneis, Nick Leverton, Dietmar Lippold, Gert-Jan C.
Lokhorst, John Love-Jensen, Satwinder Mangat, Anton Marsden, Bede
McCall, Shane McCarron, Ian McKellar, Chris Nappin, Ann Navarro,
Kenichi Numata, Morten Blinksbjerg Nielsen, Allan Odgaard, Matt
Oshry, Gerald Oskoboiny, Paul Ossenbruggen, Ernst Paalvast,
Christian Pantel, Dimitri Papadopoulos, Steven Pemberton, Lee Anne
Phillips, Xavier Plantefeve, Karl Prinz, Andy Quick, Ross L.
Richardson, Philip Riebold, Erik Rossen, Dan Rudman, Christian
Ruetgers, Klaus Johannes Rusch, John Russell, Eric Schindler, J.
Schlauch, Christian Schüler, Klaus Alexander Seistrup, Jim Seymour,
Kazuyoshi Shimizu, Geoff Sinclair, Jo Smith, Paul Smith, Steve
Spilker, Rafi Stern, Michael J. Suzio, Zac Thompson, Oren Tirosh,
John Tobler, Loïc Trégan, Jason Tribbeck, Simon Trimmer, Steffen
Ullrich, Stuart Updegrave, Charles A. Upsdell, Jussi Vestman, Larry
W. Virden, Daniel Vogelheim, Jez Wain, Randy Waki, Paul Ward, Jeff
Young, Christian Zuckschwerdt
Dave's Address
73b Ground Corner
Holt
Wiltshire
BA14 6RT
United Kingdom
Dave Raggett <[email protected]> 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.