quick way to delete extraneous tags?

[rlauriston]

Say a document has some extraneous tags: for example, instead of <li>lorem ipsum</li> it has <li><p>lorem ipsum</p></li>.

Deleting the p using the structure bar deletes the text as well.

I could cut or copy the text, delete the p in the tag bar and select delete, then paste the text. Or I could open the topic in the text editor, delete the tags, save, and close. Is there some more efficient way?

[lacastle]

right-click on the tag bar item (p or li) and choose "unbind" or "make simple..."

sometimes you have to take all the formatting off of the text and then start over. that's usually what i end up doing.

[rlauriston]

right-click on the tag bar item (p or li) and choose "unbind"

Huh, that was one of the first things I tried, but it messed things up. Tried again and it just deletes the p tags. Thanks.

[Nita Beck]

You could also do a global search-and-replace using wildcards (ever so carefully!!! Make a backup first!).

Frankly, I'm not sure you can do this in Flare, as I never do these kinds of global actions with Flare. My tool of choice if FAR HTML. I can create a neat little search-and-replace routine that will go through my entire Flare project in seconds. Very slick. In fact, when I'm dealing with legacy content imported from RoboHelp, I have a set of FAR HTML routines that I've saved and run as needed. I can clean up an imported project really fast.

Hope this helps.

p.s. A shout-out to Brian (aka "Brain") L. of the Rochester Flare User Group for turning us all on to FAR HTML. I know that others on the forums here have also recommended it. I wouldn't go "Flare-ing" without it.

[i-tietz]

I'm not sure what you mean:
Do you mean to get rid of the odd <li><p>content</p></li> or
do you mean to get rid of all those cases throughout a project?

The odd case: Right-click on the li block on the left of the text and chose Make Simple Item(s). This "messes" things up, if you have more than one <p> in the <li> or if you have indented <p> following the list:

indented_p_after_list.png

Throughout the project: Find yourself a tool that can
- search and replace
- in a file structure
- using regular expressions (RE)
I used a nice little one called TextCrawler.
Performing a find & replace using RE is not as dangerous as it is otherwise. But you will have to "invest" a bit of brain and time to find your way with RE. Once you have done that everything becomes easier and safer.

[trent the thief]

I'm not sure what you mean:
Do you mean to get rid of the odd <li><p>content</p></li> or
do you mean to get rid of all those cases throughout a project?

The odd case: Right-click on the li block on the left of the text and chose Make Simple Item(s). This "messes" things up, if you have more than one <p> in the <li> or if you have indented <p> following the list:

indented_p_after_list.png

Throughout the project: Find yourself a tool that can
- search and replace
- in a file structure
- using regular expressions (RE)
I used a nice little one called TextCrwaler.
Performing a find & replace using RE is not as dangerous as it is otherwise. But you will have to "invest" a bit of brain and time to find your way with RE. Once you have doen that everything becomes easier and safer.

I recently cleaned up a projected that was import from html generated by MS Word. IMHO, it isn't efficient to perform major clean ups in Flare. A good text editor (I used TextPad) with a regex search and replace function will make the effort less painful. It was nice to see the status bar report things like, "Changed 12090 occurrences."

[Carsten Pedersen]

I did the exact same exercise a month ago on more than 300 topics
I would love if Flare could do this for you.

However I found a nice tool being able to do a search and replace on multiple lines. This could be a great new feature in Flare
to be able to replace more than one line at a time.

Since Flare works with XHTML I think the need to regular expression searches could be a simple tag search and replace.
E.g. find all occurrences of <li><p> (also if in multiple lines, despite of wrapping in the file etc.) and replace this with <li>,
and then it should automatically take care of the </p></li> also of cause.

Other tools also offers MS Office cleaning tools, which could be an idea?

-cpede

[trent the thief]

A tag replacement could be okay, but if you need to change tags that occur only with certain plain text and leave identical tags eleswhere, then the search needs to be a bit more powerful than simple tag replacements.

That's why I went with TextPad's regex S&R.

[Carsten Pedersen]

Yes. you are of cause right. With Reg.Exp.you can do almost anything. It is however difficult to write a complex search string
using Reg.Exp. since the syntax is rather complicated.

My point was, that since what we want to change is always something in XHTML some clever developer could maybe invent
a special Tag replacing/altering tool, with a more simple syntax.

-cpede