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AutoFormat.RemoveEmpty
TYPE: bool
VERSION: 3.2.0
DEFAULT: false
--DESCRIPTION--

When enabled, HTML Purifier will attempt to remove empty elements that contribute no semantic information to the document. The following types of nodes will be removed:

  • Tags with no attributes and no content, and that are not empty elements (remove <a></a> but not <br />), and
  • Tags with no content, except for:
    • The colgroup element, or
    • Elements with the id or name attribute, when those attributes are permitted on those elements.

Please be very careful when using this functionality; while it may not seem that empty elements contain useful information, they can alter the layout of a document given appropriate styling. This directive is most useful when you are processing machine-generated HTML, please avoid using it on regular user HTML.

Elements that contain only whitespace will be treated as empty. Non-breaking spaces, however, do not count as whitespace. See %AutoFormat.RemoveEmpty.RemoveNbsp for alternate behavior.

This algorithm is not perfect; you may still notice some empty tags, particularly if a node had elements, but those elements were later removed because they were not permitted in that context, or tags that, after being auto-closed by another tag, where empty. This is for safety reasons to prevent clever code from breaking validation. The general rule of thumb: if a tag looked empty on the way in, it will get removed; if HTML Purifier made it empty, it will stay.

--# vim: et sw=4 sts=4