Provided by: tidy_5.2.0-2_amd64 
NAME
tidy - check, correct, and pretty-print HTML(5) files
SYNOPSIS
tidy [option ...] [file ...] [option ...] [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. For command line options that expect a numerical argument, a default is assumed if
no meaningful value can be found.
OPTIONS
File manipulation
-output <%s>, -o <%s>
write output to the specified <file> (output-file: <%s>)
-config <%s>
set configuration options from the specified <file>
-file <%s>, -f <%s>
write errors and warnings to the specified <file> (error-file: <%s>)
-modify, -m
modify the original input files (write-back: yes)
Processing directives
-indent, -i
indent element content (indent: auto)
-wrap <%s>, -w <%s>
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. (wrap: <%s>)
-upper, -u
force tags to upper case (uppercase-tags: yes)
-clean, -c
replace FONT, NOBR and CENTER tags with CSS (clean: yes)
-bare, -b
strip out smart quotes and em dashes, etc. (bare: yes)
-gdoc, -g
produce clean version of html exported by Google Docs (gdoc: yes)
-numeric, -n
output numeric rather than named entities (numeric-entities: yes)
-errors, -e
show only errors and warnings (markup: no)
-quiet, -q
suppress nonessential output (quiet: yes)
-omit omit optional start tags and end tags (omit-optional-tags: yes)
-xml specify the input is well formed XML (input-xml: yes)
-asxml, -asxhtml
convert HTML to well formed XHTML (output-xhtml: yes)
-ashtml
force XHTML to well formed HTML (output-html: yes)
-access <%s>
do additional accessibility checks (<level> = 0, 1, 2, 3). 0 is assumed if <level> is missing.
(accessibility-check: <%s>)
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
-show-config
list the current configuration settings
-help-option <%s>
show a description of the <option>
-language <%s>
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`.
(language: <%s>)
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
USAGE
Use --optionX valueX for the detailed configuration option "optionX" with argument "valueX". See also
below under Detailed Configuration Options as to how to conveniently group all such options in a single
config file.
Input/Output default to stdin/stdout respectively. Single letter options apart from -f and -o may be
combined as in:
tidy -f errs.txt -imu foo.html
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.
EXIT STATUS
0 All input files were processed successfully.
1 There were warnings.
2 There were errors.
______________________________
DETAILED CONFIGURATION OPTIONS
This section describes the Detailed (i.e., "expanded") Options, which may 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 standard option.
SYNOPSIS
tidy --option1 value1 --option2 value2 [standard options ...]
tidy -config config-file [standard options ...]
WARNING
The options detailed here do not include the "standard" command-line options (i.e., those preceded by a
single '-') described above in the first section of this man page.
DESCRIPTION
A list of options for configuring the behavior of Tidy, which can be passed either on the command line,
or specified in a configuration 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; consult the Example[s] provided
below for the option[s] in question.
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. There are five categories: HTML, XHTML, XML options, Diagnostics options, Pretty Print
options, Character Encoding options, and Miscellaneous options.
OPTIONS
HTML, XHTML, XML options:
add-xml-decl
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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.
alt-text
Type: String
Default: -
Default: -
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
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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.
bare
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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 legacy tags will be replaced with CSS <style> tags and structural markup as appropriate.
coerce-endtags
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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
Type: String
Default: -
Default: -
This option specifies the prefix that Tidy uses for styles rules.
By default, c will be used.
decorate-inferred-ul
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should decorate inferred <ul> elements with some CSS markup to avoid
indentation to the right.
doctype
Type: DocType
Default: auto
Example: html5, omit, auto, strict, transitional, user
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.
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.
drop-empty-elements
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should discard empty elements.
drop-empty-paras
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should discard empty paragraphs.
drop-font-tags
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
Deprecated; do not use. This option is destructive to <font> tags, and it will be removed from
future versions of Tidy. Use the clean option instead.
If you do set this option despite the warning it will perform as clean except styles will be
inline instead of put into a CSS class. <font> tags will be dropped completely and their styles
will not be preserved.
If both clean and this option are enabled, <font> tags will still be dropped completely, and other
styles will be preserved in a CSS class instead of inline.
See clean for more information.
drop-proprietary-attributes
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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.
enclose-block-text
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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-cdata
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should convert <![CDATA[]]> sections to normal text.
fix-backslash
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should replace backslash characters \ in URLs with forward slashes
/.
fix-bad-comments
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should replace unexpected hyphens with = characters when it comes
across adjacent hyphens.
The default is yes.
This option is provided for users of Cold Fusion which uses the comment syntax: <!--- --->.
fix-uri
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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.
gdoc
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should enable specific behavior for cleaning up HTML exported from
Google Docs.
hide-comments
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should print out comments.
hide-endtags
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option is an alias for omit-optional-tags.
indent-cdata
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should indent <![CDATA[]]> sections.
input-xml
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should use the XML parser rather than the error correcting HTML
parser.
join-classes
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should combine styles to generate a single, new style if multiple
style values are detected on an element.
literal-attributes
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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.
logical-emphasis
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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.
lower-literals
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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.
merge-divs
Type: AutoBool
Default: auto
Example: auto, y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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-emphasis
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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>.
merge-spans
Type: AutoBool
Default: auto
Example: auto, y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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
ncr
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should allow numeric character references.
new-blocklevel-tags
Type: Tag names
Default: -
Example: 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
new-empty-tags
Type: Tag names
Default: -
Example: 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
new-inline-tags
Type: Tag names
Default: -
Example: 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
new-pre-tags
Type: Tag names
Default: -
Example: 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
numeric-entities
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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
omit-optional-tags
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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.
output-html
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should generate pretty printed output, writing it as HTML.
output-xhtml
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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.
preserve-entities
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should preserve well-formed entities as found in the input.
quote-ampersand
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should output unadorned & characters as &.
quote-marks
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should output non-breaking space characters as entities, rather than
as the Unicode character value 160 (decimal).
repeated-attributes
Type: enum
Default: keep-last
Example: 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
replace-color
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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.
show-body-only
Type: AutoBool
Default: no
Example: auto, y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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.
skip-nested
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies that Tidy should skip nested tags when parsing script and style data.
strict-tags-attributes
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This options ensures that tags and attributes are applicable for the version of HTML that Tidy
outputs. When set to yes (the default) 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
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should output attribute names in upper case.
The default is no, which results in lower case attribute names, except for XML input, where the
original case is preserved.
uppercase-tags
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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.
word-2000
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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 using Word's "Save As: Web Page, Filtered".
Diagnostics options:
accessibility-check
Type: enum
Default: 0 (Tidy Classic)
Example: 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/.
show-errors
Type: Integer
Default: 6
Example: 0, 1, 2, ...
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
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should display info-level messages.
show-warnings
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should suppress warnings. This can be useful when a few errors are
hidden in a flurry of warnings.
Pretty Print options:
break-before-br
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should output a line break before each <br> element.
escape-scripts
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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.
indent
Type: AutoBool
Default: no
Example: auto, y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should begin each attribute on a new line.
indent-spaces
Type: Integer
Default: 2
Example: 0, 1, 2, ...
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
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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.
markup
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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).
punctuation-wrap
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should line wrap after some Unicode or Chinese punctuation
characters.
sort-attributes
Type: enum
Default: none
Example: 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.
split
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option has no function and is deprecated.
tab-size
Type: Integer
Default: 8
Example: 0, 1, 2, ...
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.
vertical-space
Type: AutoBool
Default: no
Example: auto, y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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
Type: Integer
Default: 68
Example: 0 (no wrapping), 1, 2, ...
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
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should line wrap text contained within ASP pseudo elements, which
look like: <% ... %>.
wrap-attributes
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should line wrap text contained within JSTE pseudo elements, which
look like: <# ... #>.
wrap-php
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should line wrap text contained within PHP pseudo elements, which
look like: <?php ... ?>.
wrap-script-literals
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should line wrap text contained within <![ ... ]> section tags.
Character Encoding options:
ascii-chars
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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
char-encoding
Type: Encoding
Default: utf8
Example: raw, ascii, latin0, latin1, utf8, iso2022, mac, win1252, ibm858, utf16le, utf16be, utf16,
big5, shiftjis
This option specifies the character encoding Tidy uses for both the input and output.
For ascii Tidy will accept Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) 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 are encoded as UTF-8.
You can use iso2022 for files encoded using the ISO-2022 family of encodings e.g. ISO-2022-JP.
For mac and win1252, Tidy will accept vendor specific character values, but will use entities for
all characters whose value >127.
For unsupported encodings, use an external utility to convert to and from UTF-8.
See also: input-encoding, output-encoding
input-encoding
Type: Encoding
Default: utf8
Example: raw, ascii, latin0, latin1, utf8, iso2022, mac, win1252, ibm858, utf16le, utf16be, utf16,
big5, shiftjis
This option specifies the character encoding Tidy uses for the input. See char-encoding for more
info.
See also: char-encoding
language
Type: String
Default: -
Default: -
Currently not used, but this option specifies the language Tidy would use if it were properly
localized. For example: en.
newline
Type: enum
Default: Platform dependent
Example: 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,
Mac OS X, and Unix).
output-bom
Type: AutoBool
Default: auto
Example: auto, y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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
Type: Encoding
Default: utf8
Example: raw, ascii, latin0, latin1, utf8, iso2022, mac, win1252, ibm858, utf16le, utf16be, utf16,
big5, shiftjis
This option specifies the character encoding Tidy uses for the output.
Note that this may only be different from input-encoding for Latin encodings (ascii, latin0,
latin1, mac, win1252, ibm858).
See char-encoding for more information
See also: char-encoding
Miscellaneous options:
error-file
Type: String
Default: -
Default: -
This option specifies the error file Tidy uses for errors and warnings. Normally errors and
warnings are output to stderr.
See also: output-file
force-output
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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.
gnu-emacs
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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.
gnu-emacs-file
Type: String
Default: -
Default: -
Used internally.
keep-time
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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
Type: String
Default: -
Default: -
This option specifies the output file Tidy uses for markup. Normally markup is written to stdout.
See also: error-file
quiet
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
This option specifies if Tidy should output the summary of the numbers of errors and warnings, or
the welcome or informational messages.
slide-style
Type: String
Default: -
Default: -
This option has no function and is deprecated.
tidy-mark
Type: Boolean
Default: yes
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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.
write-back
Type: Boolean
Default: no
Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0
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.
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.