Configuring and Using HTML Tidy

Question

I would like to use Textmate's built-in Tidy (Ctrl+Shift+H) functionality to indent my HTML 'without modifying anything' in the code. I write pretty neat HTML already, I just need Tidy to indent my code with Soft-tabs.

Currently it breaks a lot of things and the formatting isn't perfect either. Can someone please write a Tidy config for me that does this:

1 - Indents only, nothing else.

2 - I don't need certain tags to be pushed on a newline. For example: Tidy does this:

<li>
  <a href="#">link</a>
</li>

Original Code (or What I need):

<li><a href="#">link</a></li>

..so if I can pre-define which tags to be kept inline, that would be great.

Basically, I'd like to duplicate Dreamweaver's HTML formatting functionality with Tidy, but the two things mentioned above are really important.

I think this is my current (default?) Tidy config:

${TM_TIDY:-tidy}" -f /tmp/tm_tidy_errors -iq -utf8 \
      -wrap 0 --tab-size $TM_TAB_SIZE --indent-spaces $TM_TAB_SIZE \
    --indent yes \
      ${TM_XHTML:+-asxhtml --output-xhtml yes} \
      ${TM_SELECTED_TEXT:+--show-body-only yes} \
      --enclose-text yes \
      --doctype strict \
    --wrap-php no \
      --tidy-mark no`

I'd greatly appreciate any help. Thanks!

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 02 '09 at 07:31

Tidy isn't really meant to do this the way you want to use it. It is not a general-purpose code formatting library, it is a HTML cleanup tool. From the homepage:

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.

I really don't think there is a good way to get it to do what you want, but you could play with the whole list of options and see which ones are closer to your ideal.

Thanks for the info, but I did try using inline-tags, they never work as expected. — eozzy, Oct 02 '09 at 08:19

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 10 '11 at 21:35

2

Try Pretty Diff. It will beautify your code without making any assumptions about your code. You can submit small incomplete fragments of code and Pretty Diff will output this small fragment with indentation.

http://prettydiff.com/?m=beautify&html

answered Dec 10 '11 at 21:35

austincheney

1,097
7
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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 13 '09 at 14:59

1

In the tiddy config file, set indent option to no.

http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/

answered Sep 13 '09 at 14:59

John M

59
1

I should set indent to NO although I DO want indentation? – eozzy Sep 13 '09 at 17:01
@Nimbuz, yes, that is correct. "--indent yes" will cause the rewriting that you are trying to avoid. Try it yourself. – Zac Thompson Oct 02 '09 at 07:06

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 17 '13 at 13:08

I hope this to be useful to people stumbling on this page:

If you select the text that you wish to format (aka reindent), TextMate will apply specific actions only to that selection. So, if you CMD+A your document and then apply Tidy (either from the Bundles > HTML menu or with the CTRL+SHIFT+H shortcut) it will indent the selection, skipping alerts on validation which happen when you execute Tidy with no selection. These alerts can sometimes be unnecessary since we often work on page snippets (at least I do).

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 28 '10 at 07:13

0

Changing --indent yes to --indent auto works for me. Its not configurable but seems to handle most cases well.

answered Apr 28 '10 at 07:13

mattfawcett

96
6

score -1 · Answer 6 · answered Jan 20 '10 at 16:31

so, Nimbuz, you also mentioned "Currently it breaks a lot of things" -- you mean it introduces line breaks or it generates HTML that doesn't display properly? Because the latter is happening to me pretty badly, and if you've gotten that to work with a special config, i'd love to see it (trying to do the same thing you want... just formatting). thanks!

score -3 · Answer 7 · answered Oct 07 '09 at 16:13

-3

Figured out the inline-tags, works now!

answered Oct 07 '09 at 16:13

eozzy

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1

This doesn't help people who also have your same problem. Please remember to elaborate on solutions you find. – Jonathan Dumaine Oct 06 '11 at 22:43

Configuring and Using HTML Tidy

7 Answers7