Tidings

Tidings is a simple wrapper around Andy Lester's HTML::Tidy, itself a wrapper around libtidy. It's a convenient way of making sure that all your tags are closed and that your HTML is in squinting distance of validation, to avoid late-night typos producing a page full of red at the W3 Validator.

Usage

Wrap ugly code in an <mt:section tidy="...","..."> tag:

<mt:section tidy="xhtml","numeric_entities:1;char_encoding:ascii;quote_marks:1;">
<blockquote><p>The sun comes up, the tide rolls out<br>
The trucks roll by the park still a park<br>
Where children play and pick up stones<br>
Anything to make them feel less alone - he's alone<br>
His mind is his own town where all his thoughts run aground<br>
They fall all over and down</p>
&mdash; Fugazi, "Glue Man", <i>13 Songs<i>
</mt:section>

This nasty code above, with its doubled italics tags and missing </blockquote> is tidied and reformatted to become:

<blockquote>
<p>The sun comes up, the tide rolls out<br />
The trucks roll by the park still a park<br />
Where children play and pick up stones<br />
Anything to make them feel less alone - he&#39;s alone<br />
His mind is his own town where all his thoughts run aground<br />
They fall all over and down</p>
&#8212; Fugazi, &quot;Glue Man&quot;, <i>13 Songs</i></blockquote>

The tidy attribute in the mt:section tag above is a content filter that takes "xml", "html", or "xhtml" as an argument -- "xhtml" is the default value -- and any number of HTML::Tidy arguments (strung together as key:value pairs and separated by semicolons) as an optional secondary argument. Using Tidings and HTML::Tidy to clean up character encoding issues is doable but can be tricky depending on your database and DOCTYPE; a dedicated tool like [NaughtyWordChars](http://plugins.movabletype.org/naughtywordchar/ "NaughtyWordChars at plugins.movabletype.org") is more likely to succeed.