How to normalize HTML tags in page
Platform Notice: Cloud Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products on the cloud platform.
Purpose
It happens that Confluence page unexpectedly contains redundant HTML tags which potentially cause a variety of issues such as:
However, as described at Restricted functions in Atlassian Cloud apps, you are unavailable to modify your content in the database directly.
Therefore, you need to normalize these HTML tags by using the functions provided by Confluence in such cases.
Diagnosis
Although it depends on each case, generally you can use "View Storage Format" function to browse the stored content to determine whether your page is affected by these unwanted HTML tags.
Solution
(1) Clear formatting
The handy approach is "Clear formatting". This works mainly for style-wise HTML issues. Select the target element on the affected page and hit "Clear formatting".
(2) Export to Word format
Export the page to Word format and then import the Word file back to the page. Not like "Clear formatting", in many cases, you have to fix the alignment after importing the Word file since these pages tend to contain complex elements. Besides, you still can restore the older versions even after replacing the page by import feature.
(3) Export space as XML
Always back up your data before performing any modifications which cannot be undone. If possible, test your procedure on an evaluation site first.
Please be advised that this approach is unsupported, but you can directly modify the content in entities.xml which is generated by space export or site backup. Once you edited the content, try importing and check the problematic HTML tags are fixed.
If you need any assistance from Atlassian or you found any problems related to this knowledge base, please let us know.
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