# Pretty-print and cleanse RHTML?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/pretty-print-and-cleanse-rhtml/110045>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [July 21, 2007, 11:01pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/pretty-print-and-cleanse-rhtml/110045 "2007-07-21T23:01:40Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Phlip](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/ed8c4c/32.png) [@Phlip](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Phlip)\
**Post date:** [July 21, 2007, 11:01pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/pretty-print-and-cleanse-rhtml/110045/1 "2007-07-21T23:01:40Z")

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Thanks’ y’all for the answer to an easy question - ri.

Now here’s a sick one.

HTML Tidy is an excellent program and system (by Dave Raggett) that  
cleans  
and pretty-prints HTML. Below my sig is an assertion that uses  
assert\_tidy  
to scan a @response.body, in a Rails functional test, and complain about  
any  
shenanigans in the HTML. (Take out the assert\_xml call if you would like  
to  
use it without my assert\_xpath plugin.)

Note that web browsers forgive shenanigans, but Rails developers should  
not,  
because the cleanest HTML code is easiest to test.

Suppose someone gave us fresh HTML to import as eRB (.rhtml). Such as  
from  
an obsolete PHP project. We ought to upgrade, cleanse, and pretty-print  
that  
HTML like this…

tidy -i -asxhtml old.html \> new.rhtml

That upgrades the HTML, fixes missing and broken tags, etc.

Now suppose someone forgot to do that, and they invested their new  
.rhtml  
file with lots of \<%%\>, containing if statements and code-generating  
things.

Has anyone invented a pretty-printer that skips over the \<%%\> tags?

If not, I will presently report how to tidy that code by replacing \<%  
and %\>  
with , running tidy, and switching the tags back…

–  
Phlip  
[http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510657/](http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510657/)  
“Test Driven Ajax (on Rails)”  
assert\_xpath, assert\_javascript, & assert\_ajax

def assert\_tidy(messy = @response.body, verbosity = :noisy)  
scratch\_html = RAILS\_ROOT + ‘/…/scratch.html’ # TODO tune me!  
File.open(scratch\_html, ‘w’){|f| f.write(messy) }  
gripes = `tidy -eq #{scratch_html} 2>&1`  
gripes.split(“\n”)

```
exclude, inclued = gripes.partition do |g|
  g =~ / - Info\: / or
  g =~ /Warning\: missing \<\!DOCTYPE\> declaration/ or
  g =~ /proprietary attribute/ or
  g =~ /lacks "(summary|alt)" attribute/
end

puts inclued if verbosity == :noisy
assert_xml `tidy -wrap 1001 -asxhtml #{scratch_html} 2>/dev/null`

```

end