xmlstarlet fails to indent when formatting HTML?

Question

So, I have this as input file, temp.html:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
<html><body>
<div id="ext-comp-1725" class="x-window FM-Msg-cls utility-window q-fileExplorer-window q-window show-header-line x-window-noborder x-window-plain x-resizable-pinned q-modal-window" style="position: absolute; z-index: 8020; visibility: visible; left: 188px; top: 62px; width: 900px; display: block;">
<div class="x-window-tl"><div class="x-window-tr"><div class="x-window-tc"><div class="x-window-header x-window-header-noborder x-unselectable x-window-draggable" id="ext-gen1530" style="user-select: none;">
<div class="x-tool-ct x-tool x-tool-bg" id="ext-gen1536"><div class="x-tool x-tool-icon x-tool-close"> </div></div>
<span class="x-window-header-text" id="ext-gen1541">Hello</span>
</div></div></div></div>
</body></html>

I was hoping I could pretty-print and indent tags hierarchically by using xmlstarlet:

$ xmlstarlet fo --html --recover --indent-spaces 2 --omit-decl temp.html
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
<html>
  <body>
<div id="ext-comp-1725" class="x-window FM-Msg-cls utility-window q-fileExplorer-window q-window show-header-line x-window-noborder x-window-plain x-resizable-pinned q-modal-window" style="position: absolute; z-index: 8020; visibility: visible; left: 188px; top: 62px; width: 900px; display: block;">
<div class="x-window-tl"><div class="x-window-tr"><div class="x-window-tc"><div class="x-window-header x-window-header-noborder x-unselectable x-window-draggable" id="ext-gen1530" style="user-select: none;">
<div class="x-tool-ct x-tool x-tool-bg" id="ext-gen1536"><div class="x-tool x-tool-icon x-tool-close">├é┬á</div></div>
<span class="x-window-header-text" id="ext-gen1541">Hello</span>
</div></div></div></div>
</div></body>
</html>

... however, as it is obvious from the command output above, it only indents some tags (e.g. it split <html><body> and indented those tags properly) - but fails on others (e.g. it kept </div></div></div></div> in a single line).

Is it possible to persuade/set-up xmlstarlet to split off and indent all tags, one tag per line, with proper indentation?

$ xmlstarlet --version
srcinfo-cache
compiled against libxml2 2.9.10, linked with 21209
compiled against libxslt 1.1.34, linked with 10142

The last release of this was over 10 years ago. I might encourage you to look at prettier.io as it has a ton of different language support. It's a Node program so you'll need to have node and all of the overhead that comes with too. — stdunbar
– stdunbar, Commented Dec 3, 2024 at 20:26

sdbbs · Accepted Answer · 2024-12-03 20:43:24Z

Well, it seems tidy works here (found it via A command-line HTML pretty-printer: Making messy HTML readable):

$ tidy --version
HTML Tidy for Windows version 5.8.0

$ tidy -indent -wrap 160 -ashtml -utf8 temp.html
line 3 column 1 - Warning: missing </div>
line 2 column 7 - Warning: inserting missing 'title' element
Info: Doctype given is "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
Info: Document content looks like HTML 4.01 Strict
Tidy found 2 warnings and 0 errors!

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
  <meta name="generator" content="HTML Tidy for HTML5 for Windows version 5.8.0">
  <title></title>
</head>
<body>
  <div id="ext-comp-1725" class=
  "x-window FM-Msg-cls utility-window q-fileExplorer-window q-window show-header-line x-window-noborder x-window-plain x-resizable-pinned q-modal-window"
  style="position: absolute; z-index: 8020; visibility: visible; left: 188px; top: 62px; width: 900px; display: block;">
    <div class="x-window-tl">
      <div class="x-window-tr">
        <div class="x-window-tc">
          <div class="x-window-header x-window-header-noborder x-unselectable x-window-draggable" id="ext-gen1530" style="user-select: none;">
            <div class="x-tool-ct x-tool x-tool-bg" id="ext-gen1536">
              <div class="x-tool x-tool-icon x-tool-close">
                &nbsp;
              </div>
            </div><span class="x-window-header-text" id="ext-gen1541">Hello</span>
          </div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</body>
</html>

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Other than "├é┬á" was replaced with a space, that seems to work well.

urznow · Accepted Answer · 2024-12-03 23:54:11Z

1

First convert the input file to XML (a </div> is missing). By default format uses an indentation of 2 spaces.

xmlstarlet -q format --html --recover --omit-decl temp.html |
xmlstarlet format --omit-decl

answered Dec 3, 2024 at 23:54

urznow

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