HTML to XHTML conversion

rjlee · 01-07-2005, 11:00 AM

I need tool to perform a batch conversion of around 200 HTML files into XHTML.

I understand that HTML tidy can be used for this task, and I came up with this:

Code:

tidy --wrap 99999 -c -meq --output-xhtml true file.html

For some reason, this doesn't work. In particular, it doesn't close tags that don't have end tags in HTML. I just get back pretty much what I started with, with a few blank paragraphs removed.

I've tried removing the <DOCTYPE> tag, and using various permutations of --output-xml and --as-xml, but all to no avail.

What am I doing wrong? Or can someone suggest a better utility?

slakmagik · 01-07-2005, 11:43 AM

I tried it on some utter crap html with '-asxhtml' and it didn't provide a doctype, couldn't fix several things which the w3c validator complained about, but did use xhtml empty tags (<br />) and so on, and probably made it better. On some decent html (if I do say so myself

) it worked like a charm (according to the validator, anyway.)

Code:

tidy -asxhtml -o xttest2.htm xttest.htm

Quote:

This Page Is Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!

But I'm using 'HTML Tidy for Linux/x86 released on 1st June 2004' which I seem to have compiled at 2004-09-20 15:02. Don't seem to have the --output-xhtml option.

rjlee · 01-10-2005, 04:03 AM

Thank you. It seems to be the -m flag that was confusing it; for some reason, on the port I'm using it was failing to write anything back to the file, hence I wasn't seeing its changes.

I've re-written part of the project to use temporary files and then convert those to XHTML with the right filenames, and this seems to be working now

slakmagik · 01-10-2005, 07:27 AM

Ah. I don't trust mass-converters messing with original files, anyway. Glad you got it working.