tidy : Java Glossary

Introduction

version 5.6.0 Last revised/verified: 2017-11-25 In general, a tidy program is any program that cleans up data or source. Sometimes they are called tidiers, beautifiers or pretty-printers.

There is one important program for tidying HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language v 5) called tidy.exe. It gives you quite fine control. I find it makes changes I don’t particularly like, so I do post processing with a Funduc Search and Replace script.

Tidy.exe is an open source program written in C, originally by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). It beautifies, transforms and corrects errors in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) source. For example in indents, starts new lines for <br> and converts old-style HTML to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). It is highly configurable.

Installation

Download the binary containing tidy.exe in the zip file. Unpack it and put tidy.exe into "X:\Program Files\tidy\".

Create a tidy.config file that looks something like this:

Read the Quick Reference to discover what the possible options are. Click on the option to get more detail.

You

rem run tidy on some.html replacing the contents with the tidied contents.
set TidyDir=F:\Program Files\tidy\bin
%TidyDir\tidy.exe -config E:\env\tidy.config -m some.html

Advantages

• Free and open source.
• Quick.
• Corrects many small errors as well as beautifying.
• Highly configurable.

Disadvantages

• It moves comments whether you want it to or not.
• It adds multiple blank lines. One is sufficient.
• It needlessly puts </dt> </td> etc. on a new line.
• It inserts </p> tags whether you want them or not.
• You can specify several file names on the command line, but you cannot use wild cards.
• It inserts id parameters in <a name= tags whether you want them or not.
• It does not deal well with fragments. It will insert or remove tags which will royally foul things up when you later include the fragment. It is best, for example that table fragments contain a complete table from <table> to </table>.

Bugs

• It has a serious bug. It converts your<colgroup <col attributes to classes. Unfortunately, only Internet Explorer then pays any attention to them. It effectively deletes all your <colgroup <cols.
• It splits after = even when you tell it not to.
• It scrambles <pre sections.