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# htmltidy
Tidy Up and Test XPath Queries on HTML and XML Content
## Description
HTML documents can be beautiful and pristine. They can also be wretched,
evil, malformed demon-spawn. Now, you can tidy up that HTML and XHTML
before processing it with your favorite angle-bracket crunching tools,
going beyond the limited tidying that ‘libxml2’ affords in the ‘XML’ and
‘xml2’ packages and taming even the ugliest HTML code generated by the
likes of Google Docs and Microsoft Word. It’s also possible to use the
functions provided to format or “pretty print” HTML content as it is
being tidied. Utilities are also included that make it possible to view
formatted and “pretty printed” HTML/XML content from HTML/XML document
objects, nodes, node sets and plain character HTML/XML using
‘vkbeautify’ (by Vadim Kiryukhin) and ‘highlight.js’ (by Ivan
Sagalaev). Also (optionally) enables filtering of nodes via XPath or
viewing an HTML/XML document in “tree” view using ‘XMLDisplay’ (by Lev
Muchnik). See < https: / / github . com / vkiryukhin / vkBeautify > and
< http: / / www . levmuchnik . net / Content / ProgrammingTips / WEB / XMLDisplay / DisplayXMLFileWithJavascript . html >
for more information about ‘vkbeautify’ and ‘XMLDisplay’, respectively.
Partly inspired by [this SO
question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37061873/identify-a-weblink-in-bold-in-r)
and because there’s a great deal of cruddy HTML out there that needs
fixing to use properly when scraping data.
It relies on a locally included version of
[`libtidy` ](http://www.html-tidy.org/ ) and works on macOS, Linux &
Windows.
It also incorporates an `htmlwidget` to view and test XPath queries on
HTML/XML content and another widget to view an XML document in a
collapseable tree view.
## What’s Inside The Tin
- `highlight_styles` : List available HTML/XML highlight styles
- `renderXmlview` : Widget render function for use in Shiny
- `tidy_html.response` : Tidy or “Pretty Print” HTML/XHTML Documents
- `xml_tree_view` : HTML/XML tree viewer
- `xml_view` : HTML/XML pretty printer and viewer
- `xmltreeview-shiny` : Shiny bindings for xmltreeview
- `xmlviewOutput` : Widget output function for use in Shiny
## Installation
``` r
remotes::install_git("https://git.rud.is/hrbrmstr/htmltidy.git")
# or
remotes::install_git("https://git.sr.ht/~hrbrmstr/htmltidy")
# or
remotes::install_gitlab("hrbrmstr/htmltidy")
# or
remotes::install_bitbucket("hrbrmstr/htmltidy")
# or
remotes::install_github("hrbrmstr/htmltidy")
```
NOTE: To use the ‘remotes’ install options you will need to have the
[{remotes} package ](https://github.com/r-lib/remotes ) installed.
## Usage
``` r
library(htmltidy)
# current verison
packageVersion("htmltidy")
## [1] '0.5.0'
library(XML)
library(xml2)
library(httr)
library(purrr)
```
This is really “un-tidy” content:
``` r
res < - GET ( " https: / / rud . is / test / untidy . html " )
cat(content(res, as="text"))
## <head>
## <style>
## body { font-family: sans-serif; }
## </style>
## </head>
## <body>
## <b>This is <b>some <i>really </i> poorly formatted HTML</b>
##
## as is this <span id="sp">portion<div>
```
Let’s see what `tidy_html()` does to it.
It can handle the `response` object directly:
``` r
cat(tidy_html(res, list(TidyDocType="html5", TidyWrapLen=200)))
## <!DOCTYPE html>
## <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
## <head>
## <meta name="generator" content=
## "HTML Tidy for HTML5 for R version 5.0.0" />
## <style>
## <![CDATA[
## body { font-family: sans-serif; }
## ]]>
## </style>
## <title></title>
## </head>
## <body>
## <b>This is some <i>really</i> poorly formatted HTML as is this
## <span id="sp">portion</span></b>
## <div><span id="sp"></span></div>
## </body>
## </html>
```
But, you’ll probably mostly use it on HTML you’ve identified as gnarly
and already have that HTML text content handy:
``` r
cat(tidy_html(content(res, as="text"), list(TidyDocType="html5", TidyWrapLen=200)))
## <!DOCTYPE html>
## <html>
## <head>
## <meta name="generator" content="HTML Tidy for HTML5 for R version 5.0.0">
## <style>
## body { font-family: sans-serif; }
## </style>
## <title></title>
## </head>
## <body>
## <b>This is some <i>really</i> poorly formatted HTML as is this <span id="sp">portion</span></b>
## <div><span id="sp"></span></div>
## </body>
## </html>
```
NOTE: you could also just have done:
``` r
cat(tidy_html(url("https://rud.is/test/untidy.html"),
list(TidyDocType="html5", TidyWrapLen=200)))
## <!DOCTYPE html>
## <html>
## <head>
## <meta name="generator" content="HTML Tidy for HTML5 for R version 5.0.0">
## <style>
## body { font-family: sans-serif; }
## </style>
## <title></title>
## </head>
## <body>
## <b>This is some <i>really</i> poorly formatted HTMLas is this <span id="sp">portion</span></b>
## <div><span id="sp"></span></div>
## </body>
## </html>
```
You’ll see that this differs substantially from the mangling `libxml2`
does (via `read_html()` ):
``` r
pg < - read_html ( " https: / / rud . is / test / untidy . html " )
cat(toString(pg))
## <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
## <html>
## <head>
## <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
## <style>
## body { font-family: sans-serif; }
## </style>
## </head>
## <body>
## <b>This is <b>some <i>really </i> poorly formatted HTML</b>
##
## as is this <span id="sp">portion<div></div></span></b>
## </body>
## </html>
```
It can also deal with “raw” and parsed objects:
``` r
tidy_html(content(res, as="raw"))
## [1] 3c 21 44 4f 43 54 59 50 45 20 68 74 6d 6c 3e 0a 3c 68 74 6d 6c 20 78 6d 6c 6e 73 3d 22 68 74 74 70 3a 2f 2f 77 77
## [39] 77 2e 77 33 2e 6f 72 67 2f 31 39 39 39 2f 78 68 74 6d 6c 22 3e 0a 3c 68 65 61 64 3e 0a 3c 6d 65 74 61 20 6e 61 6d
## [77] 65 3d 22 67 65 6e 65 72 61 74 6f 72 22 20 63 6f 6e 74 65 6e 74 3d 0a 22 48 54 4d 4c 20 54 69 64 79 20 66 6f 72 20
## [115] 48 54 4d 4c 35 20 66 6f 72 20 52 20 76 65 72 73 69 6f 6e 20 35 2e 30 2e 30 22 20 2f 3e 0a 3c 74 69 74 6c 65 3e 3c
## [153] 2f 74 69 74 6c 65 3e 0a 3c 2f 68 65 61 64 3e 0a 3c 62 6f 64 79 3e 0a 3c 2f 62 6f 64 79 3e 0a 3c 2f 68 74 6d 6c 3e
## [191] 0a
tidy_html(content(res, as="text", encoding="UTF-8"))
## [1] "<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml\">\n<head>\n<meta name=\"generator\" content=\n\"HTML Tidy for HTML5 for R version 5.0.0\" />\n<style>\n<![CDATA[\nbody { font-family: sans-serif; }\n]]>\n</style>\n<title></title>\n</head>\n<body>\n<b>This is some <i>really</i> poorly formatted HTML as is this\n<span id=\"sp\">portion</span></b>\n<div><span id=\"sp\"></span></div>\n</body>\n</html>\n"
tidy_html(content(res, as="parsed", encoding="UTF-8"))
## {html_document}
## <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
## [1] <head>\n<meta name="generator" content="HTML Tidy for HTML5 for R version 5.0.0">\n<meta http-equiv="Content-Type ...
## [2] <body>\n<b>This is some <i>really</i> poorly formatted HTML as is this\n<span id="sp">portion</span></b>\n<div><s ...
tidy_html(suppressWarnings(htmlParse("https://rud.is/test/untidy.html")))
## <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
## <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
## <head>
## <meta name="generator" content="HTML Tidy for HTML5 for R version 5.0.0">
## <title></title>
## </head>
## <body>
## <p>https://rud.is/test/untidy.html</p>
## </body>
## </html>
##
```
And, show the markup errors:
``` r
invisible(tidy_html(url("https://rud.is/test/untidy.html"), verbose=TRUE))
## line 1 column 1 - Warning: missing <!DOCTYPE> declaration
## line 1 column 68 - Warning: nested emphasis <b>
## line 1 column 138 - Warning: missing </span> before <div>
## line 1 column 68 - Warning: missing </b> before <div>
## line 1 column 164 - Warning: inserting implicit <span>
## line 1 column 164 - Warning: missing </span>
## line 1 column 159 - Warning: missing </div>
## line 1 column 1 - Warning: inserting missing 'title' element
## line 1 column 164 - Warning: <span> anchor "sp" already defined
## Info: Document content looks like XHTML5
## Tidy found 9 warnings and 0 errors!
```
## Testing Options
``` r
opts < - list ( TidyDocType = "html5" ,
TidyMakeClean=TRUE,
TidyHideComments=TRUE,
TidyIndentContent=FALSE,
TidyWrapLen=200)
txt < - " < html >
< head >
< style >
p { color: red; }
< / style >
< body >
<!-- ===== body ====== -->
< p > Test< / p >
< / body >
<!-- Default Zone
-->
<!-- Default Zone End -->
< / html > "
cat(tidy_html(txt, option=opts))
## <!DOCTYPE html>
## <html>
## <head>
## <meta name="generator" content="HTML Tidy for HTML5 for R version 5.0.0">
## <style>
## p { color: red; }
## </style>
## <title></title>
## </head>
## <body>
## <p>Test</p>
## </body>
## </html>
```
But, you’re probably better off running it on plain HTML source.
Since it’s C/C++-backed, it’s pretty fast:
``` r
book < - readLines ( " http: / / singlepageappbook . com / single-page . html " )
sum(map_int(book, nchar))
## [1] 207501
system.time(tidy_book < - tidy_html ( book ) )
## user system elapsed
## 0.019 0.000 0.019
```
(It’s usually between 20 & 25 milliseconds to process those 202
kilobytes of HTML.) Not too shabby.
## htmltidy Metrics
| Lang | \# Files | (%) | LoC | (%) | Blank lines | (%) | \# Lines | (%) |
| :----------- | -------: | ---: | ----: | ---: | ----------: | ---: | -------: | ---: |
| C | 27 | 0.34 | 28639 | 0.81 | 4700 | 0.77 | 4325 | 0.59 |
| C/C++ Header | 37 | 0.47 | 5796 | 0.16 | 1227 | 0.20 | 2677 | 0.36 |
| C++ | 4 | 0.05 | 647 | 0.02 | 117 | 0.02 | 64 | 0.01 |
| R | 10 | 0.13 | 151 | 0.00 | 38 | 0.01 | 235 | 0.03 |
| Rmd | 1 | 0.01 | 47 | 0.00 | 44 | 0.01 | 59 | 0.01 |
## Code of Conduct
Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of
Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its
terms.
