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Question about software that keeps track of divs better than notepad ++

I recently got hired as a web developer and a project I am watching has a formatting issue on one of the pages because one of the divs is out of control. This is a pretty complex page with quite a bit of php, and from what I can gather, I am missing a tag </div>

somewhere and everything is messed up accordingly.

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

Does anyone else have a similar situation? Is there a better editor I could use to better deal with my div problem? Or do I have to go through and line up the divs 1 by 1? (there are more than 100 of them). Please let me know!! Thanks to

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An alternative route I would like to suggest is to run your page through a validator, like a W3C service, at http://validator.w3.org p>



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

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You need an editor that detects and highlights syntax errors in your markup (as well as reality). There are many here. I am using Komodo Edit from ActiveState (www.activestate.com)



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The cross platform solution is Eclipse (PDT). It comes with a nice and user-friendly html editor. For quick file changes and fixes, I use TextMate - but that's OS X only :(

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

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

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Is this page already online in a public place? If so, have you tried to validate HTML / XHTML with the W3C validator http://validator.w3.org/ , it can point to the exact string where the closed DIV of the tag is missing.

UPDATE: you can also copy and paste the page code into the authentication window and test it: you go to your browser on the page, then you select "View Source" from the browser manu, than you copy and paste the code into the W3C validator.

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You can try using a more powerful editor like Eclipse or Netbeans. I use Netbeans for most of my HTML / PHP development and it does a great job of displaying the relevant tags.

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Vim + matchit plugin

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I am using http://users.rcn.com/creitzel/tidy.html#tidyui to fix the html.

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