[Solved] I'm a little confused about the Fix HTML - all files Tool

[DoctorOhh]

This is the first unexpected behavior I ran into. I had the following:

<p class="calibre2">Chapter 2 — Qwerty</p>

I replaced all, to swap the <p class="calibre2">Chapter with <h2>Chapter and ended up with:

<h2>Chapter 2 — Qwerty</p>

I ran the Fix HTML - all files Tool and ended up with:

</h2><h2>Chapter 2 — Qwerty</p>

The </h2> was closing the Chapter 1 <h2> tag. What I expected was:

<h2>Chapter 2 — Qwerty</h2>

Was my expectation unreasonable?

What would be a better method to make this <p> to <h2> change keeping in mind the second part (Qwerty) is different for every chapter?

[DrChiper]

I use a 2 pass approach in these cases:

1. first replacing the <p> with <h2>
2. then replacing the </p> with </h2>

I almost never use the fix HTML tool for these changes. Everything with regex.

[kovidgoyal]

Fix HTML uses the HTML 5 algorithm to fix broken HTML. In other words it results in exactly the HTML you would get if you tried to display your broken HTML in a modern web browser. This is the only sane way to implement fix html. It means that the result of doing fix html will look no different than what the original HTML looked in an actual HTML renderer.

If you want to change it using search replace use:

search:
<p.*?>(Chapter\s+\d+.*?)</p>
replace:
<h2>\1</h2>

If all the p tags have the same class you can be more specific in the above expression

[DoctorOhh]

Thanks Kovid.

What you said makes sense. I got used to being sloppy since Sigil magically fixed these errors for me. Also thanks for the example.