Code Scanning in RoboHelp 2020?

Afraid not, it's best to design structural rules to catch these things.

In this case, the rule seems rather simple from a programming point of view.

1. Find all <span> tags in the topic.
2. For each <span> tag, check if they have actual content.
3. If false, remove <span> tag.

Or in actual code:

import os
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

project_folder = 'C:\\Users\\XXX\\XXX\\GitHub\\RH\\Projects\\XXX\\contents'

def getLinks(project_folder):

    htm_files = []

    for root, dirs, files in os.walk(project_folder, topdown=False):
        for name in files:
            if name.endswith('.htm') or name.endswith('.hts'):
            htm_files.append(os.path.join(root, name))
    return htm_files

htm_files = getLinks(project_folder)

for htm_file in htm_files:
    with open(htm_file, 'r', encoding='utf-8') as file:
        data = file.read()
    soup = BeautifulSoup(data, 'html.parser')

    spans = soup.find_all('span')
    changes_were_made = False # to prevent saving every single file in project

    for span in spans:
        if len(span.contents) < 1:
            changes_were_made = True
            span.extract()

    if changes_were_made:
        with open(htm_topic, 'w', encoding='utf-8') as file:
            file.write(str(soup))

As you encounter more and more issues, the number of rules will expand. On our end, we have about a dozen or so rules at the moment.

Not that I've ever heard of - that mess looks like residual Word cruft. As Peter asks, "how are they editing"?

How are they editing? Not something I have seen that bad. 

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