HTML Formatter & Beautifier

HTML formatter and beautifier

This free HTML formatter takes minified, single-line, or inconsistently indented markup and rewrites it into clean, readable HTML. Paste a blob of source from a page, a CMS export, or a build artifact and the HTML beautifier re-indents every nested element so the document structure is obvious at a glance. Switch to minify mode and the same tool strips inter-tag whitespace and comments to shrink the payload you ship to production. Everything happens locally in your browser, so nothing you paste is ever uploaded to a server.

What the HTML beautifier does

The formatter is built on a real tokenizer rather than a pile of regular expressions, which is what lets it stay correct on awkward markup. It is quote-aware, so a greater-than sign inside an attribute value — for example title="a > b" — never confuses the parser into closing a tag early. It understands HTML void elements such as <br>, <img>, <hr>, <input>, and <meta>, so they sit on their own line without opening a phantom indentation level. Comments and the <!DOCTYPE> declaration are preserved, and the contents of raw-text elements like <script>, <style>, <pre>, and <textarea> are kept verbatim so scripts and significant whitespace are never mangled.

Beautify vs. minify

Use beautify when you want to read, review, or debug HTML — a diff is far easier to interpret when each element is on its own indented line. You can choose two-space, four-space, or tab indentation to match your project style. Use minify when you want the smallest possible file for delivery: it removes the whitespace between tags and drops comments while keeping a single space wherever inline text or inline elements need it, so the rendered output looks identical.

How to format HTML

Paste your markup into the input box, pick beautify or minify, and the result appears instantly in the output panel. Click Copy to put it on your clipboard. There is no sign-up, no size cap beyond your browser memory, and no network round trip.

When to format HTML

HTML formatting comes up constantly in day-to-day work. You might be inspecting the rendered source of a page that ships as one long line, debugging a template whose nesting has gotten away from you, cleaning up markup pasted out of an email or a rich-text editor, or preparing a tidy code sample for documentation. In each case a quick beautify makes the structure legible so you can find the element you care about. Minify mode covers the production side, trimming the bytes you send over the wire. Because the formatter is tokenizer-based and quote-aware, it stays reliable on the messy, real-world markup that breaks naive find-and-replace approaches.

Related developer tools

Formatting markup is often one step in a larger workflow. If you are encoding entities rather than re-indenting, use the HTML Encoder. For structured data, the XML Formatter and JSON Formatter apply the same tokenizer-based approach to their formats, and the CSS Formatter tidies the stylesheets that go alongside your HTML.