tidy - Man Page

check, correct, and pretty-print HTML(5) files

Examples (TL;DR)

Pretty print an HTML file: tidy path/to/file.html
Enable [i]ndentation, [w]rapping lines in 100, saving to output.html: tidy --indent y --wrap 100 -output path/to/output.html path/to/file.html
Modify an HTML file in-place using a configuration file: tidy -config path/to/configuration -modify path/to/file.html

Synopsis

tidy [options] [file ...] [options] [file ...] ...

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 <file>, -o <file> (output-file: <file>): write output to the specified <file>
-config <file>: set configuration options from the specified <file>
-file <file>, -f <file> (error-file: <file>): write errors and warnings to the specified <file>
-modify, -m (write-back: yes): modify the original input files

Processing directives

-indent, -i (indent: auto): indent element content
-wrap <column>, -w <column> (wrap: <column>): wrap text at the specified <column>. 0 is assumed if <column> 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 <level> (accessibility-check: <level>): do additional accessibility checks (<level> = 0, 1, 2, 3). 0 is assumed if <level> 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 <option>: show a description of the <option>
-language <lang> (language: <lang>): set Tidy's output language to <lang>. 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 General

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. AutoBools 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 <line number> column <column number> - (Error|Warning): <message>

to a form which includes the input filename:

<filename>:<line number>:<column number>: (Error|Warning): <message>

Document In and Out options

--add-meta-charset Boolean (no if unset)

This option, when enabled, adds a <meta> 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 <?xml ... ?> 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 <pre>, <style> and <script> 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 <!DOCTYPE html>.

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.

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) performs no additional accessibility checking.

Level 1 (Priority 1 Checks) performs the Priority Level 1 checks.

Level 2 (Priority 2 Checks) performs the Priority Level 1 and 2 checks.

Level 3 (Priority 3 Checks) performs the Priority Level 1, 2, and 3 checks.

For more information on Tidy's accessibility checking, including the specific checks that are made for each Priority Level, please 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.

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 <i>, <b>, <center> when enclosed within appropriate inline tags, and <font>). If set to yes, then the legacy tags will be replaced with CSS <style> 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 <i> with <em> and any occurrence of <b> with <strong>. 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 <div> such as <div><div>...</div></div>.

If set to auto the attributes of the inner <div> are moved to the outer one. Nested <div> with id attributes are not merged.

If set to yes the attributes of the inner <div> 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 <span> such as <span><span>...</span></span>.

The algorithm is identical to the one used by merge-divs.

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.

Repair options

--alt-text String

This option specifies the default alt= text Tidy uses for <img> 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

<span>foo <b>bar<b> baz</span>

Tidy will output

<span>foo <b>bar</b> baz</span>

--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. <flag-icon> 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 <p> 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 <p> 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 </g to be escaped to <\/g. Set this option to no if you do not want this.

--fix-backslash Boolean (yes if unset)

This option specifies if Tidy should replace backslash characters \ in URLs with forward slashes /.

--fix-bad-comments Enum (auto if unset)

Supported values: no, yes, auto

This option specifies if Tidy should replace unexpected hyphens with = characters when it comes across adjacent hyphens.

The default is auto will which will act as no for HTML5 document types, and yes for all other document types.

HTML has abandoned SGML comment syntax, and allows adjacent hyphens for all versions of HTML, although XML and XHTML do not. If you plan to support older browsers that require SGML comment syntax, then consider setting this value to yes.

--fix-style-tags Boolean (yes if unset)

This option specifies if Tidy should move all style tags to the head of the document.

--fix-uri Boolean (yes if unset)

This option specifies if Tidy should check attribute values that carry URIs for illegal characters and if such are found, escape them as HTML4 recommends.

--literal-attributes Boolean (no if unset)

This option specifies how Tidy deals with whitespace characters within attribute values.

If the value is no Tidy normalizes attribute values by replacing any newline or tab with a single space, and further by replacing any contiguous whitespace with a single space.

To force Tidy to preserve the original, literal values of all attributes and ensure that whitespace within attribute values is passed through unchanged, set this option to yes.

--lower-literals Boolean (yes if unset)

This option specifies if Tidy should convert the value of an attribute that takes a list of predefined values to lower case.

This is required for XHTML documents.

--repeated-attributes Enum (keep-last if unset)

Supported values: keep-first, keep-last

This option specifies if Tidy should keep the first or last attribute, if an attribute is repeated, e.g. has two align attributes.

See also: --join-classes, --join-styles

--skip-nested Boolean (yes if unset)

This option specifies that Tidy should skip nested tags when parsing script and style data.

--strict-tags-attributes Boolean (no if unset)

This options ensures that tags and attributes are applicable for the version of HTML that Tidy outputs. When set to yes and the output document type is a strict doctype, then Tidy will report errors. If the output document type is a loose or transitional doctype, then Tidy will report warnings.

Additionally if drop-proprietary-attributes is enabled, then not applicable attributes will be dropped, too.

When set to no, these checks are not performed.

--uppercase-attributes Enum (no if unset)

Supported values: no, yes, preserve

This option specifies if Tidy should output attribute names in upper case.

When set to no, attribute names will be written in lower case. Specifying yes will output attribute names in upper case, and preserve can used to leave attribute names untouched.

When using XML input, the original case is always preserved.

--uppercase-tags Boolean (no if unset)

This option specifies if Tidy should output tag names in upper case.

The default is no which results in lower case tag names, except for XML input where the original case is preserved.

Transformation options

--decorate-inferred-ul Boolean (no if unset)

This option specifies if Tidy should decorate inferred <ul> elements with some CSS markup to avoid indentation to the right.

--escape-cdata Boolean (no if unset)

This option specifies if Tidy should convert <![CDATA[]]> 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 <b> and <i> elements; for example, for the case

<b class="rtop-2">foo <b class="r2-2">bar</b> baz</b>,

Tidy will output <b class="rtop-2">foo bar baz</b>.

--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 <table>, <ul>, <ol> and <dl>.

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 <pre> 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 <br> 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 <title>, <h1>-<h6>, <li>, <td>, or <p> 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.

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.

Author

Tidy was written by Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org>, 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.

Info

HTML Tidy 5.8.0

tidy - Man Page

Examples (TL;DR)

Synopsis

Description

Options

File manipulation

Processing directives

Character encodings

Miscellaneous

XML

Configuration Options General

Document Display options

Document In and Out options

File Input-Output options

Diagnostics options

Encoding options

Cleanup options

Entities options

Repair options

Transformation options

Teaching Tidy options

Pretty Print options

Environment

Exit Status

See Also

Author

Info