Convert from HTML to XML With HTML Tidy

An anonymous reader writes "HTML Tidy, a powerful tool to help convert old HTML pages to newer standards, such as XML. This tip demonstrates how to convert HTML documents to XML (or more specifically, XHTML) with a simple, open source tool. This conversion is useful for webmasters who are migrating to XML. It can also help XML converts who have to interface with legacy HTML tools."

Comments

libxml2?

[dakkar]

A few days ago I had to convert HTML pages into XHTML, stripping out a few extra elements and attributes. I used xsltproc, from libxslt , which uses the parser from libxml2 , and this has the option of parsing strict HTML into an XML DOM.

XMLTidy can be useful when you have a not-so-strict HTML, but for most quick conversions I've found libxml2 &co to be quite light and easy.

Re:I'll check it out

[fm6]

I've sneered at XHTML in the past, but I was speaking out of ignorance. I was assuming it was just a silly attempt to preserve HTML in an XML world. Actually, it's a very convenient bridge between HTML and XML. It's only incidentally about web content, since browsers will always need to support legacy HTML, and thus will never adopt all of XHTML's structure and restrictions. But once you have your content in XHTML format, you can transform it into any XML application you choose, using XSLT scripts. Which opens up a whole world of possibilities for people with all their content in messy old word processor formats, since word processor now tend to come with HTML export filters.