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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-07T04:26:04+00:00

I maintain a database of articles with HTML formatting. Unfortunately the editors who wrote

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I maintain a database of articles with HTML formatting. Unfortunately the editors who wrote articles didn’t know proper HTML, so they often have written stuff like:

<div class="highlight"><html><head></head><body><p>Note that ...</p></html></div>

I tried using HTML::TreeBuilder to parse this HTML but after parsing it and dumping the resulting tree, all the elements between <div class="highlight">...</div> are gone. I’m left with just <div class="highlight"></div>.

The editors often have also done things like:

<div class="article"><style>@font-face {   font-family: "Cambria"; }</style>Article starts here</div>

Parsing this with HTML::TreeBuilder results in empty <div class="article"></div> again.

Any ideas how to approach this broken HTML and actually make sense out of it?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I would first run it through HTML::Tidy:

    #!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict; use warnings;
use HTML::Tidy;

my $html = <<EO_HTML;
<div class="highlight"><html><head></head>
<body><p>Note that ...</p></html>
</div>
EO_HTML

my $tidy = HTML::Tidy->new;

print $tidy->clean( $html );

    Output:

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta name="generator" content="tidyp for Windows (v1.04), see www.w3.org">
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<div class="highlight">
<p>Note that ...</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>

    You can control the output by setting various configuration options.

    Then, feed the cleaned HTML through a parser.

    Otherwise, you can try building a tree one-step-at-a-time using HTML::TokeParser::Simple or even just HTML::Parser, but I believe that way lies insanity.

    Keep in mind that a parser that tries to build a tree representation will be stricter than a stream parser that just recognizes various elements as it sees them.

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