Download and install Tidy. For help, do: tidy -help To clean up HTML by creating indented code, wrapping text at column #500, converting HTML to XHTML, and modify the existing file in place, do the following: tidy -i -w 500 -asxml -m Make sure to make a backup copy of the file first. Now remove blank lines from the resulting cleaned-up code using perl: perl -pi -e "s/^\n//"