Yes, you are right it's an HTML::Tidy issue not a perl tidy use. I mistyped. Here's the current code. Trying your new in the for loop suggestion:

use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::Tidy;

my $call_dir = "Bing/1Parsed/Html3";
my $contents_of_file = 1;
#my $tidy = HTML::Tidy->new();

#commented out for now
#my $tidy = HTML::Tidy->new({
#   tidy_mark => 1,
#   #output_xhtml => 1, # yes
#   #output_xhtml => 1, # yes
#   add_xml_decl => 1, # no
#   wrap   => 76,
#   error_file => 'errs.txt',
#   char_encoding => 'utf8',
#   indent_cdata => 1,
#   clean => 1,
#   fix_bad_comments =>1
#});

my @files = glob "$call_dir/*.html";
printf "Got %d files\n", scalar @files;

for my $file (@files) {
    
    #added new Tidy piece here to test:
    
    my $tidy = HTML::Tidy->new({
       tidy_mark => 1,
       #output_xhtml => 1, # yes
       #output_xhtml => 1, # yes
       add_xml_decl => 1, # no
       wrap   => 76,
       error_file => 'errs.txt',
       char_encoding => 'utf8',
       indent_cdata => 1,
       clean => 1,
       fix_bad_comments =>1
    });
    
    open my $in_fh, '<', $file 
       or die "Could not open $file : $!"; 
     my $contents_of_file = do { local $/;<$in_fh> };
     close $in_fh;
  
     $tidy->parse( $file, $contents_of_file );
    
     open OUT,'>',$file or die "$!";
     print OUT $tidy->clean( $file, $contents_of_file );
     print "cleaning" . $file. "\n";
for my $message ( $tidy->messages ) {
    #print $message->as_string;
}
 
}
[download]

Compiles fine now. I'm testing speed with ->new before the for and after.

Thanks. This version runs ok - I tried it on directory containing 77 html files, and it was pretty quick. What quantity of data are you handling? How big is the memory footprint?

Just a couple other suggestions:

• fix your indentation - making the code more legible really helps.
• create the cleaned output html files in a separate directory, leaving the original input files unaltered, so that you can do multiple runs on the same input data, compare input to output, and compare outputs using different setups
• use @ARGV for selecting input and output paths
Something like this:

...
unless ( @ARGV == 2 and -d $ARGV[0] and -d $ARGV[1] ) {
    die "Usage:  $0  input/path  output/path\n"
}
my ( $indir, $outdir ) = @ARGV
my @files = glob "$indir/*.html";
die "No html files found in $indir\n" unless ( @files );
...
for my $file ( @files ) {
    ...
    ( my $ofile = $file ) =~ s{$indir}{$outdir};
    open OUT, '>', $ofile or die "$!";
    ...
}
[download]

Thanks for your suggestions on format changes and code improvements - I'll work on putting them in. Regarding size I'm running the script of about 3,000 files. OK at first much slower as it continues. Any ideas? Thanks!