Question about software that tracks divs better than notepad++

Question

I recently got hired as a web developer, and the project that I am overseeing has a formatting issue on one of the pages because one of the divs is out of whack. It is a fairly complex page with quite a bit of php, and from what I can gather, I am missing a </div> tag somewhere, and accordingly everything is messed up.

I am currently using notepad++, which is decent at lining up divs, meaning that if you click on the opening div tag, it will highlight purple and also highlight the closing one. But it seems as though if you have div tags that span several lines (hundreds) it won't work.

Has anyone else run into a similar situation? Is there a better editor I could be using that would do a better job of helping me with my div issue? Or do I have to go through and line up the divs 1 by 1? (there are like over 100). Please let me know!! Thanks

Answer 1

You want an editor that detects and highlights syntax errors in markup (as well as validity). There are many. I use Komodo Edit from ActiveState (www.activestate.com)

Answer 2

A cross platform solution is Eclipse (PDT). It comes with a nice and handy html editor. For quick file changes and hotfixes I use TextMate – but this is OS X only :(

Answer 3

You could try using a more "Powerful" editor such as Eclipse or Netbeans. I use Netbeans for most of my HTML / PHP development, and it does a good job of highlighting matching tags.

Answer 4

Sometimes, when I have crazy X/HTML that I am trying to clean up/debug I put it into an XML editor and let it do some of the matching/formatting for me. My personal choice is Altova's XMLSpy. It is not free (hell, it's not even cheap), but I really like the power it has. You can download a free demo from their website and see if it helps you out.

Answer 5

Like what others have said, use a free editor like Eclipse. Open your HTML in Eclipse, then press CTRL+SHIFT+F and it will format and indent the code, just like what Notepad++ does.

Answer 6

Vim + matchit plugin

Answer 7

Is this page already online in public area? If yes, did you try to validate the HTML/XHTML with W3C validator http://validator.w3.org/, it might tell you the exact line where the closed DIV tag is missing.

UPDATE: you can also copy and paste code of the page deirectly into the validator and validate it: you go with your browser at the page, then you select "View Source" from the browser manu, than you copy & paste code into W3C validator.

Answer 8

An alternate route I would like to suggest is running your page through a validator, such as the W3C service at http://validator.w3.org

HTML Validator is an addon for Firefox that can automatically run your pages through a local validator and notify you of any issues with an icon in the satus bar.

Answer 9

I use http://users.rcn.com/creitzel/tidy.html#tidyui for fixing html.