in reply to Modules or rules to find ill-formatted HTML

A bit more information would be helpful.

Under what circumstances are you trying to find ill-formatted HTML tags?

I ask because one case that occurs to me is a situation where you are building or proof-reading raw html on a local machine. If so, using the w3c validator will be easy, free and produce up-to-date results.

Using Perl to use the w3c validator will be more complex (in that case), but it's doable. Write your script to

  1. read your html file into local memory
  2. connect to w3c, send the html page (won't work if merely a fragment, IIRC) to the validator (it accepts a URI, file upload or direct input (cut'n'paste), and capture the return (with one of the usual suspects - search the Monastery for 'web scraping' for one set of ideas).
  3. display the returned errors, warnings, or 'good to go' message for the user or spit'em out to dead trees or whatever.

At a minimum, you can expect standard-based validation this way; Tidy has it's own (configurable within limits) set of notions about valid .html and, as noted above, HTML::Validator may have some outdated notions.

  • Comment on Re: Modules or rules to find ill-formatted HTML

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Re^2: Modules or rules to find ill-formatted HTML
by Anonymous Monk on Oct 09, 2008 at 19:33 UTC
    I recently tried cleaning up following HTML and got problem. The end quote was missing on an attribute value. use strict; use warnings; use HTML::Tidy; my $html="<a href=\"mailto:test\@test.net>Email Us"; my $tidy = HTML::Tidy->new(); my $clean = $tidy->clean($html); print "Clean HTML:\n---------------------------\n$clean\n"; This produced incorrect output.
[reply]

      Unreadable!

      Please use <code>...</code> tags ... and please read Markup in the Monastery

      Now, what you posted appears (XML view) to be intended to render this way:

      I recently tried cleaning up following HTML and got problem. The end quote was missing on an attribute value.
      use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::Tidy;
my $html="<a href=\"mailto:test\@test.net><font size=4>Email Us</a>";
my $tidy = HTML::Tidy->new();
my $clean = $tidy->clean($html);
print "Clean HTML:\n---------------------------\n$clean\n";

      [download]
      This produced incorrect output.

      So, what was the incorrect output? Please also read How do I post a question effectively?.

      ...and on the offchance you don't know what's wrong with your $html, check the quoting, the missing </font> tag, and the H::T docs.

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