tidy

2005 Jan 8 at 01:06 » Tagged as :

Tidy, and HTML manipulation tool is something that has been in my mind for a long time and finally I found the time to download it and try it out yesterday.

It's mildly suprising that there hasn't been a new release for nearly three years. Since the project itself is quite popular (judging not only by the buggy sf stats but the references to tidy in varius mailing lists) it would seem that the project is remarkably stable. Another big plus is that he download is only 140Kb, definitely not bloatware.

I was even more pleasently suprised to find no configure script, all you need to do is type make and make install. With in seconds after downloading tidy was up and running and quanta automatically detected it's presence. What a stark contrast from some of the software that I have tried out in recent past.

The next step is to try to integrate tidy with PHP, for that apparently you have to download another package, because the makefile for the maiin tidy download does not seem to have a target for building 'libtidy'. The PHP tidy extension chokes on a missing libtidy, so back to sf.net it is. In the meantime i tried the java fork but it would not compile with 1.4.2 of java

[javac] An exception has occurred in the compiler (1.4.2). Please file a bug at the Java Developer Connection (http://java.sun.com/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi) after checking the Bug Parade for duplicates. Include your program and the following diagnostic in your report. Thankyou.

[javac] java.lang.InternalError: jzentry == 0,

[javac] jzfile = 137679128,

[javac] total = 1374,

[javac] name = /usr/java/j2sdk1.4.2/lib/tools.jar,

[javac] i = 879,

[javac] message = invalid LOC header (bad signature)

so there is truth in the old adage that appearences can be deceptive.