HTML Formatter

How to use HTML Formatter

Three simple steps, with your content kept on your device.

Built for useful work

Fast, focused, and made to be clear on every screen.

Why use an HTML formatter

An HTML beautifier turns minified or hand-compressed markup into readable, consistently indented source. When you inspect a page template, an email body, or a component snippet, consistent indentation reveals the nesting structure instantly — where a div closes, which elements are siblings, and where a tag was accidentally left open.

Beyond readability, a formatter is a debugging aid. Missing quotation marks, unbalanced angle brackets, and misnested elements become visible once every level is aligned. The tool formats HTML locally as text, so pasted markup is never rendered as a live web page while you work on it.

How to pretty print HTML

To pretty print HTML, paste your source into the editor, choose an indentation width (two spaces, four spaces, or tabs), and run the formatter. The output preserves the original tag names, attribute text, and content while adding layout whitespace around common block elements.

The workflow is intentionally text-only: input and result stay in text areas, and the tool never asks the browser to render or execute the markup. That makes it safe to format snippets copied from emails, templates, or third-party pages without worrying about embedded scripts or styles running.

What the formatter preserves

The formatter keeps the source text of tags and attributes and only adjusts indentation around block-level elements. Raw-text elements — script, style, pre, and textarea — keep their contents untouched, which matters when you are formatting a page that embeds JavaScript or CSS.

Comments and doctype declarations are also preserved. If your source uses HTML comments to document sections or temporarily disable markup, they survive the formatting pass and stay exactly where you placed them.

Handling malformed HTML

Unterminated tags, unbalanced quotes, and incomplete comments produce a recoverable error instead of partial output. The formatter reports that the source is malformed rather than guessing how to repair it, which avoids silently changing your markup.

Raw null control characters are rejected as well, since they are never valid in an HTML document. This keeps the output clean and ensures that what you copy back into your project is well-formed source text.

When to format HTML locally

Pasting markup into an online service often means uploading templates, email designs, or internal component code to a third-party server. Formatting HTML locally keeps that source on your device, which is useful when you are working with proprietary page templates or customer email layouts.

Because processing happens entirely in the browser, there is no file size upload, no queue, and no waiting. Large templates format in a single pass, and the same workflow works offline once the page is loaded.

Formatting related markup

HTML is rarely the only markup in a project. The same approach that makes HTML readable applies to other source formats: CSS can be formatted and indented with the CSS Formatter, and XML documents can be beautified with the XML Formatter.

For conversion tasks, the HTML Table to CSV tool extracts table data into spreadsheets, and the CSV to HTML Table tool does the reverse. Together these tools cover the common markup and data workflows developers meet every day.

Formatting options explained

Indentation width is a team preference more than a technical decision. Two spaces keep deeply nested templates compact, four spaces give each level more visual separation, and tabs let each developer view the file at their own width. The formatter supports all three so output matches your project's style guide.

The tool is deterministic: the same input always produces the same output. That makes it safe to include in a formatting workflow, because the result can be verified and committed without surprises.

Whether you are cleaning up a legacy template, preparing a snippet for documentation, or auditing markup from another system, a local HTML formatter gives you readable source in seconds without any of your code leaving the browser.

Frequently asked questions