Checking HTML code

When solving text formatting issues, it might be neccessary to display the HTML code and remove tags which got accidentally inserted when pasting the text.

1. Display source code

Click at “Source” icon in the text editor.

2. HTML tags

Before editing the code, let´s have a brief look at HTML tags. Tags begin with < and end with >. HTML tags can be of two types – paired tags for example  and unpaired tags for example. When removing paired tags you need to remove opening tag as well as closing tag and leave the text that is between the tags, see point 3 below.

See the image below for some of the most common tags.

3. Inspect the code and remove HTML tags

Plain text should not contain any HTML except for the line break element . It is save to remove all tags and their attributes from the text. In another words everything enclosed in angle brackets can be removed. Please note that the Paste as plain text function should strip all HTML from text so you do not have to do this manually. Also, the “Remove Format” function (point 3. in the same article) could be a great help here.

4. Example 1 – editing text from Google Docs

4. Example 2 – editing bulleted list from Google Docs

When editing lists ul, ol and li elements actaully need to stay. But because the code can be really messy with too many attributes it might be easier to remove everything in brackets and create the list again using our editor. The process is decribed on the images below. Again please note that the Paste as plain text function should strip all HTML from text so you do not have to do this manually.