Actually, fixing that is pretty easy. Yes, you keep a stack of opening tags that you're within, and then whenever you find a closing tag which doesn't match the top of the stack, you need to add the right closing tag and then try again - and again, and again, and again, until everything's back in sync. You also need to handle the end of the document correctly so that you automagically close anything left on the stack.

With a little more trickery (but only a little) you can take account of stuff like <HR> and <BR> not needing to be closed, that only certain tags are legal immediately inside others (eg <TR> is legal inside <TABLE> but <HR> isn't) and so on.

Even if you ignore all those special cases, you'll have a good solution.


In reply to Re: Ensuring HTML is "balanced" by DrHyde
in thread Ensuring HTML is "balanced" by skx

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.