HTML Formatter

HTML Formatter takes markup that arrived as one long line, or indented by five different people, and prints it with consistent indentation so the structure is visible. Nesting becomes obvious, a missing closing tag becomes obvious, and the whole thing becomes something you can read rather than decode.

Formatting respects the places where whitespace matters. The contents of pre and textarea elements are left exactly as they were, because adding indentation inside them changes what the page displays. Script and style blocks are kept intact rather than being indented as if they were markup. Comments, doctype declarations and self-closing tags are all handled rather than mangled.

Inline elements such as span, a and strong stay on the line with their surrounding text, because breaking them onto their own lines introduces whitespace that changes the rendered spacing. That one rule is the difference between a formatter you can use on real pages and one you cannot.

• Consistent indentation with two spaces, four spaces or tabs
• Leaves pre and textarea content untouched
• Keeps script and style blocks intact
• Inline elements stay on the line with their text
• Handles comments, doctype and self-closing tags
• Optional attribute wrapping for long tags
• Reports unclosed tags it had to guess about
• Copy or download the result

The html formatter is used by writers, developers, students, marketers and anyone else who needs the job done once without installing software. Common cases include:

• Reading minified HTML from a built page
• Tidying markup copied out of a CMS editor
• Making a diff readable before reviewing it
• Finding a missing closing tag by eye
• Normalising indentation across a team