For most of my web page reconnoitering, Firebug fits the bill quite nicely. There are occasions, however, when I simply need to view larger swaths of HTML code, without all of Firebug’s features in the way. The well-used View Source can work well:
But when the structure of a page is fairly complicated, seeking to the section of code desired can be time-consuming.
And so we can do better by selecting the part of the page that is of interest, right-clicking, and selecting “View Selection Source”:
This brings up the entire page’s source, but centered on the selected part, with that part of the code highlighted. Perfect!
Except for a small oversight: The code browser used with View Selection Source detects and corrects malformed HTML! When one is trying to correct bugs on a web page, this behavior can wreak havoc. I’ll provide a real example. I needed to scrape a table from a webpage. I then needed to pull certain rows from this table for recording, ignoring others. This was created and worked well, until one day it suddenly broke. I suspected the structure of the page holding the table had changed, causing issues for parsing. So I went to the page, selected the end of the desired part of the table, and chose View Selection Source. Strangely, there was no malformedness to be found! After a lot more debugging, I happened to do the same check again, but by using View Source and looking for the section of interest. Lo, and behold! A malformed tag. Now I knew what I needed to fix, way after I needed to.
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