HTML Tidy Configuration Options Quick Reference

# Quick Reference

## HTML Tidy Configuration Options

HTML, XHTML, XML
Diagnostics
Pretty Print
Character Encoding
Miscellaneous

HTML, XHTML, XML Options | Top
Option | Type | Default
add-xml-decl | Boolean | no
add-xml-pi | Boolean | no
add-xml-space | Boolean | no
alt-text | String |
assume-xml-procins | Boolean | no
bare | Boolean | no
break-before-br | Boolean | no
clean | Boolean | no
doctype | DocType | auto
drop-empty-paras | Boolean | yes
drop-font-tags | Boolean | no
drop-proprietary-attributes | Boolean | no
enclose-block-text | Boolean | no
enclose-text | Boolean | no
escape-cdata | Boolean | no
fix-bad-comments | Boolean | yes
fix-uri | Boolean | yes
hide-comments | Boolean | no
hide-endtags | Boolean | no
indent-cdata | Boolean | no
input-xml | Boolean | no
join-classes | Boolean | no
join-styles | Boolean | yes
logical-emphasis | Boolean | no
lower-literals | Boolean | yes
ncr | Boolean | yes
new-blocklevel-tags | Tag names |
new-empty-tags | Tag names |
new-inline-tags | Tag names |
new-pre-tags | Tag names |
numeric-entities | Boolean | no
output-xhtml | Boolean | no
output-xml | Boolean | no
quote-ampersand | Boolean | yes
quote-marks | Boolean | no
quote-nbsp | Boolean | yes
repeated-attributes | - | keep-last
replace-color | Boolean | no
show-body-only | Boolean | no
slide-style (Tidy Classic) | Name |
split (Tidy Classic) | Boolean | no
uppercase-attributes | Boolean | no
uppercase-tags | Boolean | no
word-2000 | Boolean | no
Diagnostics Options | Top
Option | Type | Default
show-errors | Integer | 6
show-warnings | Boolean | yes
accessibility-check | Integer | 0
Pretty Print Options | Top
Option | Type | Default
indent | AutoBool | no
indent-attributes | Boolean | no
indent-spaces | Integer | 2
literal-attributes | Boolean | no
markup | Boolean | yes
tab-size | Integer | 4
wrap | Integer | 68
wrap-asp | Boolean | yes
wrap-attributes | Boolean | no
wrap-jste | Boolean | yes
wrap-php | Boolean | yes
wrap-script-literals | Boolean | no
wrap-sections | Boolean | yes
Character Encoding Options | Top
Option | Type | Default
ascii-chars | Boolean | yes
char-encoding | Encoding | ascii
input-encoding | Encoding | latin1
language | Language |
output-bom | AutoBool | auto
output-encoding | Encoding | ascii
newline | enum | Platform Dependent
Miscellaneous Options | Top
Option | Type | Default
fix-backslash | Boolean | yes
output-file | String |
error-file | String |
force-output | Boolean | no
gnu-emacs | Boolean | no
quiet | Boolean | no
keep-time | Boolean | yes
write-back | Boolean | no
tidy-mark | Boolean | yes

HTML, XHTML, XML Options Reference
add-xml-decl | Top
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.
add-xml-pi | Top
Type: Boolean Default: no Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0 |
This option is the same as the add-xml-decl option.
add-xml-space | Top
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 | Top
Type: String Default: -none- |
This option specifies the default "alt=" text Tidy uses for <IMG> attributes. This feature is dangerous as it suppresses further accessibility warnings. You are responsible for making your documents accessible to people who can not see the images!
assume-xml-procins | Top
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 | Top
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.
break-before-br | Top
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.
clean | Top
Type: Boolean Default: no Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0 |
This option specifies if Tidy should strip out surplus presentational tags and attributes replacing them by style rules and structural markup as appropriate. It works well on the HTML saved by Microsoft Office products.
doctype | Top
Type: DocType Default: auto Example: auto, omit, strict, loose, transitional, user specified fpi (string) |
This option specifies the DOCTYPE declaration generated by Tidy. If set to "omit" the output won't contain a DOCTYPE declaration. 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 strict DTD. If set to "loose", the DOCTYPE is set to the 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 the empty string. Tidy leaves the DOCTYPE for generic XML documents unchanged. `--doctype omit` implies `--numeric-entities yes`.
drop-empty-paras | Top
Type: Boolean Default: yes Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0 |
This option specifies if Tidy should discard empty paragraphs. If set to no, empty paragraphs are replaced by a pair of <BR> elements as HTML4 precludes empty paragraphs.
drop-font-tags | Top
Type: Boolean Default: no Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0 |
This option specifies if Tidy should discard <FONT> and <CENTER> tags rather than creating the corresponding style rules, but only if the clean option is also set to yes.
drop-proprietary-attributes | Top
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 MS data binding attributes.
enclose-block-text | Top
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 | Top
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 | Top
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-bad-comments | Top
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 | Top
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 HTML 4 recommends.
hide-comments | Top
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 | Top
Type: Boolean Default: no Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0 |
This option specifies if Tidy should omit optional end-tags when generating the pretty printed markup. This option is ignored if you are outputting to XML.
indent-cdata | Top
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 | Top
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 | Top
Type: Boolean Default: no Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0 | join-styles repeated-attributes
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 | Top
Type: Boolean Default: yes Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0 | join-classes repeated-attributes
This option specifies if Tidy should combine styles to generate a single new style, if multiple style values are detected on an element.
logical-emphasis | Top
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> by <EM> and any occurrence of <B> by <STRONG>. In both cases, the attributes are preserved unchanged. This option can be set independently of the clean and drop-font-tags options.
lower-literals | Top
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.
ncr | Top
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 | Top
Type: Tag names Default: -none- 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>.
new-empty-tags | Top
Type: Tag names Default: -none- Example: tagX, tagY, ... | new-blocklevel-tags new-inline-tags
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.
new-inline-tags | Top
Type: Tag names Default: -none- 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.
new-pre-tags | Top
Type: Tag names Default: -none- 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 can not as yet add new CDATA elements (similar to <SCRIPT>).
numeric-entities | Top
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 (&amp;, &lt;, &gt; and &quot;) in the numeric rather than the named entity form.
output-xhtml | Top
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. If a DOCTYPE or namespace is given they will checked for consistency with the content of the document. In the case of an inconsistency, the corrected values will appear in the output. For XHTML, entities can be written as named or numeric entities according to the setting of the "numeric-entities" option. The original case of tags and attributes will be preserved, regardless of other options.
output-xml | Top
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 a XML parser. The original case of tags and attributes will be preserved, regardless of other options.
quote-ampersand | Top
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 &amp;.
quote-marks | Top
Type: Boolean Default: no Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0 |
This option specifies if Tidy should output " characters as &quot; as is preferred by some editing environments. The apostrophe character ' is written out as &#39; since many web browsers don't yet support &apos;.
quote-nbsp | Top
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 | Top
Type: - Default: keep-last Example: keep-first, keep-last | join-classes join-styles
This option specifies if Tidy should keep the first or last attribute, if an attribute is repeated, e.g. has two align attributes.
replace-color | Top
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 by HTML/XHTML color names where defined, e.g. replace "#ffffff" with "white".
show-body-only | Top
Type: Boolean Default: no Example: 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. Useful for incorporating existing whole pages as a portion of another page.
slide-style (Tidy Classic only) | Top
Type: Name Default: -none- | split
Currently not used.
split (Tidy Classic only) | Top
Type: Boolean Default: no Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0 |
This option specifies if Tidy should create a sequence of slides from the input, splitting the markup prior to each successive <H2>. The slides are written to "slide001.html", "slide002.html" etc.
uppercase-attributes | Top
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 | Top
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 | Top
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". Doesn't handle embedded images or VML.
Diagnostics Options Reference
gnu-emacs | Top
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.
quiet | Top
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.
show-errors | Top
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-warnings | Top
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.
accessibility-check | Top
Type: Integer Default: 0 Example: 0, 1, 2, 3 |
This option specifies what level of accessibility checking, if any, that Tidy should do. Level 0 is equivalent to Tidy Classic's accessibility checking. For more information on Tidy's accessibility checking, visit the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto.
Pretty Print Options Reference
indent | Top
Type: AutoBool Default: no Example: auto, y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0 | indent-spaces
This option specifies if Tidy should indent block-level tags. If set to "auto", this option causes Tidy to decide whether or not to indent the content of tags such as TITLE, H1-H6, LI, TD, TD, or P depending on whether or not the content includes a block-level element. You are advised to avoid setting indent to yes as this can expose layout bugs in some browsers.
indent-attributes | Top
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 | Top
Type: Integer Default: 2 Example: 0, 1, 2, ... | indent
This option specifies the number of spaces Tidy uses to indent content, when indentation is enabled.
literal-attributes | Top
Type: Boolean Default: no Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0 |
This option specifies if Tidy should ensure that whitespace characters within attribute values are passed through unchanged.
markup | Top
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).
tab-size | Top
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. Tidy never outputs tabs.
wrap | Top
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 zero if you want to disable line wrapping.
wrap-asp | Top
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 | Top
Type: Boolean Default: no Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0 | wrap-script-literals
This option specifies if Tidy should line wrap attribute values, for easier editing. This option can be set independently of wrap-script-literals.
wrap-jste | Top
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 | Top
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 | Top
Type: Boolean Default: no Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0 | wrap-attributes
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.
wrap-sections | Top
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 Reference
ascii-chars | Top
Type: Boolean Default: yes Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0 | char-encoding
Can be used to modify behavior of -c (--clean yes) option. Defaults to "yes" when using -c. Set to "no" to prevent converting >emdash;, &rdquo;, and other named character entities to their ascii equivalents.
char-encoding | Top
Type: Encoding Default: ascii Example: ascii, latin0, latin1, raw, utf8, iso2022, mac, win1252, ibm858, utf16, utf16le, utf16be, big5, shiftjis | input-encoding output-encoding
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 is 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.
input-encoding | Top
Type: Encoding Default: latin1 Example: ascii, latin0, latin1, raw, utf8, iso2022, mac, win1252, ibm858, utf16, utf16le, utf16be, big5, shiftjis | char-encoding
This option specifies the character encoding Tidy uses for the input. See char-encoding for more info.
language | Top
Type: Language Default: -none- Example: en |
Currently not used, but this option specifies the language Tidy uses.
output-bom | Top
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; only for 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 | Top
Type: Encoding Default: ascii Example: ascii, latin0, latin1, raw, utf8, iso2022, mac, win1252, ibm858, utf16, utf16le, utf16be, big5, shiftjis | char-encoding
This option specifies the character encoding Tidy uses for the output. See char-encoding for more info. May only be different from input-encoding for Latin encodings (ascii, latin0, latin1, mac, win1252, ibm858).
newline | Top
Type: Enum Default: Platform Dependent Example: LF, CRLF, CR |
The default is appropriate to the current platform: CRLF on Windows and OS/2, CR on the Mac and LF everywhere else (Unix and Linux).
Miscellaneous Options Reference
fix-backslash | Top
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 by forward slashes "/".
output-file | Top
Type: String Default: -none- | error-file
This option specifies the output file Tidy uses for markup. Normally markup is written to "stdout".
error-file | Top
Type: String Default: -none- | output-file
This option specifies the error file Tidy uses for errors and warnings. Normally errors and warnings are output to "stderr".
force-output | Top
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.
keep-time | Top
Type: Boolean Default: yes Example: y/n, yes/no, t/f, true/false, 1/0 |
This option specifies if Tidy should alter the last modified time for files it writes back to. The default is no, which allows you to tidy files without affecting which ones will be uploaded to a Web server when using a tool such as 'SiteCopy'. Note that this feature may not work on some platforms.
write-back | Top
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.
tidy-mark | Top
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.