HTML Formatter/Beautifier
Paste minified or messy markup below and this HTML formatter restructures it with proper indentation so you can actually follow the document's structure.
About
About HTML Formatter/Beautifier
An html formatter takes markup that's either minified for production or just inconsistently written, and restructures it with consistent indentation and line breaks. This html formatter beautifier pays attention to the handful of HTML elements, like pre and textarea, where whitespace is actually meaningful to the browser and has to be left alone rather than reformatted like everything else.
Most HTML elements ignore extra whitespace entirely, which is exactly why minification works without changing how a page renders. But a few elements, pre, textarea, and anything styled with white-space: pre, treat whitespace as significant content. A formatter that doesn't account for this can quietly break a code block's exact spacing while cleaning up everything around it.
Void elements like br, img, hr, and input don't have closing tags in HTML, unlike in XML or XHTML where every element is explicitly closed. A good formatter needs to know the difference, since adding a closing tag to a void element isn't just unnecessary, it's technically invalid HTML even though most browsers will silently tolerate it.
Paste your markup in and choose two-space, four-space, or tab indentation to match your project's style. The nesting hierarchy gets expanded automatically, with syntax highlighting making it easy to trace which closing tag belongs to which opening one in a deeply nested section.
This runs entirely in your browser's JavaScript engine, so a client's unreleased landing page or a proprietary component library never gets uploaded anywhere just to get cleaned up and made readable again.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What's the real difference between a formatter and a minifier?
A formatter adds spacing and line breaks so a human can read the code comfortably. A minifier strips all of that back out to shrink the file for faster delivery to the browser. They're functionally opposite operations on the same code.
Will formatting change how my page actually renders?
No. Browsers collapse and ignore extra whitespace in standard HTML, so reformatting the source changes only how it looks to you as a developer, the rendered output in the browser stays identical.
Does this tool fix broken or unclosed tags automatically?
It won't rewrite your markup's logic for you, but properly applied indentation makes a missing closing tag much easier to spot visually, since the nesting will visibly fail to line up where the error is.
Is it safe to paste client or proprietary code into this?
Yes, the entire formatting process runs through your browser's own JavaScript engine. Nothing you paste gets transmitted to a server or stored anywhere outside your current tab.
Does the formatter preserve whitespace inside a pre or textarea element?
Yes, it needs to, since whitespace inside those elements is meaningful content rather than just visual spacing, and reformatting it the same way as the rest of the document would actually change what the page displays.
What indentation size is considered standard for HTML?
There's no universal rule, but two spaces and four spaces are both common conventions. Two spaces tends to hold up better in deeply nested markup, where four-space indentation can push content uncomfortably far to the right.
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