Disable trimming empty elements

[mperham]

I've got a document which uses Bootstrap glyphicons like so:

<li> <span class="glyphicon glyphicon-ok-sign"> </span></li><li><span class="glyphicon glyphicon-ok-sign"></span></li><li><span class="glyphicon glyphicon-ok-sign"></span></li>

tidy5 strips out all of the empty lis and spans, making the document worthless. I just want a tool which pretty prints the HTML, not something which mangles the document. Possible/reasonable?

[geoffmcl]

@mperham have you tried the option --drop-empty-elements no?

Seems this will do what you want?

And maybe --drop-empty-paras no if you want to also keep empty <p> elements...

Also, if like the sample shown, it is just a html snippet, then you may want to add --show-body-only yes...

And just a reminder, -help-config will output the considerable list of Tidy! options, and -show-config will list the current defaults...

If installed in a unix/linux system then $ man tidy should bring up manual page tidy(1) with option descriptions...

And the same thing can be seen on - http://www.html-tidy.org/quickref.html -

I guess Tidy! would prefer to call it fixing, rather than mangling the document!

But it is agreed it takes some time to get with the some 94 diverse options of Tidy! ;=))

[mperham]

Thank you @geoffmcl, I had no idea about those options or help screens. I'm used to curl, which prints out all zillion options on its help screen.