clean-html

HTML cleaner and beautifier

Do you have crappy HTML? I do!

<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
        <tr>
          <td height="31"><b>Currently we have these articles available:</b>

        <blockquote>
              <p><a href="foo.html">The History of Foo</a><br />    
                An <span color="red">informative</span> piece  of <FONT FACE="ARIAL">information</FONT>.</p>
              <p><a href="bar.html">A Horse Walked Into a Bar</a><br/> The bartender said
                "Why the long face?"</p>
	</blockquote>
          </td>
        </tr>
      </table>

Just look at those blank lines and random line breaks, trailing spaces, mixed tabs, deprecated tags - it's outrageous!

Let's clean it up:

var cleaner = require('clean-html'),
    fs = require('fs'),
    filename = process.argv[2];

fs.readFile(filename, function (err, data) {
    cleaner.clean(data, function (html) {
        console.log(html);
    });
});

Running this script on the file above produces the following output:

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>
      <b>Currently we have these articles available:</b>
      <blockquote>
        <p>
          <a href="foo.html">The History of Foo</a>
          <br>
          An <span>informative</span> piece of information.
        </p>
        <p>
          <a href="bar.html">A Horse Walked Into a Bar</a>
          <br>
          The bartender said "Why the long face?"
        </p>
      </blockquote>
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

You can pass additional options to the clean function like this:

var options = {
    'add-remove-tags': ['table', 'tr', 'td', 'blockquote']
};

cleaner.clean(data, options, function (html) {
    console.log(html);
});

In this case, it produces:

<b>Currently we have these articles available:</b>
<p>
  <a href="foo.html">The History of Foo</a>
  <br>
  An <span>informative</span> piece of information.
</p>
<p>
  <a href="bar.html">A Horse Walked Into a Bar</a>
  <br>
  The bartender said "Why the long face?"
</p>

Sanity restored!

Options

break-around-comments

Adds line breaks before and after comments.

Type: Boolean
Default: true

break-around-tags

Tags that should have line breaks added before and after.

Type: Array
Default: ['blockquote', 'br', 'div', 'h1', 'h2', 'h3', 'h4', 'h5', 'h6', 'hr', 'p', 'table', 'td', 'tr']

indent

The string to use for indentation. e.g., a tab character or one or more spaces.

Type: String
Default: ' ' (two spaces)

remove-attributes

Attributes to remove from markup.

Type: Array
Default: ['align', 'bgcolor', 'border', 'cellpadding', 'cellspacing', 'color', 'height', 'target', 'valign', 'width']

remove-comments

Removes comments.

Type: Boolean
Default: false

remove-empty-tags

Tags to remove from markup if empty.

Type: Array
Default: []

remove-tags

Tags to always remove from markup. Nested content is preserved.

Type: Array
Default: ['center', 'font']

replace-nbsp

Replaces non-breaking white space entities ( ) with regular spaces.

Type: Boolean
Default: false

wrap

The column number where lines should wrap. Set to 0 to disable line wrapping.

Type: Integer
Default: 120

Adding values to option lists

These options exist for your convenience.

add-break-around-tags

Additional tags to include in break-around-tags.

Type: Array
Default: null

add-remove-attributes

Additional attributes to include in remove-attributes.

Type: Array
Default: null

add-remove-tags

Additional tags to include in remove-tags.

Type: Array
Default: null

Global installation

If this package is installed globally, it can be used from the command line:

$ cat crappy.html | clean-html

Instead of piping the input from another program, you can supply a filename as the first argument:

$ clean-html crappy.html

You can redirect the output to another file:

$ clean-html crappy.html > clean.html

Or you can edit the file in place:

$ clean-html crappy.html --in-place

All of the options above can be used from the command line. Array option values should be separated by commas:

$ clean-html crappy.html --add-remove-tags b,i,u

Boolean options can be set to true like this:

$ clean-html crappy.html --remove-comments

Or like this

$ clean-html crappy.html --remove-comments true

They can be set to false like this:

$ clean-html crappy.html --remove-comments false