TIDY(1) 5.6.0 TIDY(1)
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 <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 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 if Tidy should change the format for
reporting errors and warnings to a format that is more easily
parsed by GNU Emacs.
--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-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 <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.
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 strip Microsoft specific
HTML from Word 2000 documents, 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.
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 &.
--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 <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 abandonded SGML comment syntax, and allows adjacent
hypens 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.
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 <![CDATA[]]>
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 <pre>,
and other CDATA elements like <script>, <style>, and other
pseudo elements like <?php ... ?>. 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 <html>, <head>, and
<body> elements to be omitted from output, as well as such end
tags as </p>, </li>, </dt>, </dd>, </option>, </tr>, </td>, and
</th>.
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 (yes if unset)
This option specifies if Tidy should line wrap text contained
within PHP pseudo elements, which look like: <?php ... ?>.
--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 <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.
HTML Tidy 5.6.0 TIDY(1)
Generated by dwww version 1.15 on Wed Jun 26 06:06:42 CEST 2024.