How it works
The HTML Formatter (also called HTML Beautifier) takes raw, unformatted, or minified HTML and adds consistent indentation and line breaks to make the document structure immediately readable.
Unformatted HTML is difficult to navigate. Tags nest dozens of levels deep, attributes run together, and the relationship between parent and child elements is invisible. A well-formatted HTML document lets you immediately understand the DOM structure, spot missing closing tags, find attributes at a glance, and review changes in a meaningful diff.
How to use it: paste any HTML — a full page, a component snippet, or a table fragment. The formatter applies 2-space indentation per nesting level, places block elements on new lines, keeps inline elements on the same line as surrounding text, and preserves the content of pre and script tags without reformatting them.
Formatting rules applied: block elements (div, p, section, article, header, footer, ul, ol, table, etc.) are placed on their own lines with correct indentation. Inline elements (span, a, strong, em, code) flow inline. Self-closing void elements (br, hr, img, input, meta, link) are handled correctly without adding a closing tag. Attribute indentation aligns multi-attribute tags for readability.
Use cases: reading HTML from a website's source view, debugging template rendering issues, preparing HTML snippets for documentation, reviewing generated HTML from a UI framework, and cleaning up copy-pasted HTML from email clients or Word documents.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Inline <style> blocks are formatted using CSS formatting rules. Inline <script> blocks are formatted using JavaScript formatting rules. Content in <pre> tags is left unchanged to preserve intentional whitespace.
- The formatter uses a lenient parser that can handle many common HTML issues (unclosed tags, mismatched quotes). However, severely malformed HTML may produce unexpected formatting or an error.
- No. Adding whitespace between block elements does not change how browsers render HTML. The visual output is identical — only the source code readability changes.
- The formatter preserves the structure it finds without adding or removing tags. It will not auto-close missing </div> or </p> tags — use an HTML validator for that.