How do I tidy up an HTML file s indentation in VI

Question

How do I fix the indentation of his huge html files which was all messed up   I tried the usual  gg G command  which is what I use to fix the indentation of code files   However  it didn t seem to work right on HTML files   It simply removed all the formatting   I also tried setting  filetype   xml  to see if tricking it into thinking this was an XML file would help but it still didn t do it

User · Answer

Here s a heavy-weight solution that gets you indenting  plus all the HTML pretty-printing you don t necessarily want to care about while you re editing   First  download Tidy  Make sure you add the binary to your path  so you can call it from any location   Next  create a config file describing your favorite HTML flavor  Documentation is not great for Tidy  but here s an overview  and a list of all the options  Here s my config file   bare  yes break-before-br  no clean  yes drop-proprietary-attributes  yes fix-uri  yes indent-spaces  4 indent  yes logical-emphasis  yes markup  yes output-xhtml  yes quiet  yes quote-marks  yes replace-color  yes tab-size  4 uppercase-tags  no vertical-space  yes word-2000  yes wrap  0   Save this as tidyrc html txt in your ftplugin folder  under vimfiles    One more file  add the following line to  or create  html vim  also in ftplugin   map  lt leader gt tidy     tidy -config   vimfiles ftplugin tidyrc html txt  lt CR gt    To use it  just open an HTML file  and type  tidy   That   is the  lt leader gt  key    There you go  Not a quick solution  by any means  but now you re a bit better equipped for editing those huge  messed-up HTML files

User · Answer

This is my solution that works nicely for opening  ugly  HTML in a nicely spaced way   vim fileIn html -c  set sw 2    s  gt   gt  r    execute  normal gg G    set nohlsearch   g    s    d     The sw command is because my default is 4  which is too high for HTML  The next part adds a newline  Vim thinks it s a carriage return  sigh  after each element   gt    Then re-indent the entire file with    Then unhighlight  gt   since I have set hlsearch in my vimrc   Then remove all empty whitespace-only lines  see  Vim delete blank lines  for more  also this is double-escaped because it s in the shell     You can even add   wq  fileOut html to the end if you don t want to enter Vim at all  but just clean up the file

User · Answer

I tried the usual  gg G  command  which is what I use to fix the indentation of code files  However  it didn t seem to work right on HTML files  It simply removed all the formatting    If vim s autoformat indent gg G seems to be  broken   such as left indenting every line   most likely the indent plugin is not enabled loaded  It should really give an error message instead of just doing bad indenting  otherwise users just think the autoformat indenting feature is awful  when it actually is pretty good   To check if the indent plugin is enabled loaded  run  scriptnames  See if     indent html vim is in the list  If not  then that means the plugin is not loaded  In that case  add this line to    vimrc   filetype plugin indent on   Now if you open the file and run  scriptnames  you should see     indent html vim  Then run gg G  which should do the correct autoformat indent now   Although it won t add newlines  so if all the html code is on a single line  it won t be indented    Note  if you are running  filetype plugin indent on on the vim command line instead of    vimrc  you must re-open the file  e   Also  you don t need to worry about autoindent and smartindent settings  they are not relevant for this

User · Answer

Have you tried using the HTML indentation script on the Vim site    http   www vim org scripts script php script id 2075

User · Answer

As tylerl explains above  set the following    filetype indent on  set filetype html  set smartindent   However  note that in vim 7 4 the HTML tags html  head  body  and some others are not indented by default  This makes sense  as nearly all content in an HTML file falls under those tags  If you really want to  you can get those tags to be indented like so    let g html indent inctags    html body head tbody     See  HTML indenting not working in compiled Vim 7 4  any ideas   and  alternative html indent script  for more information

User · Answer

I use this script  https   github com maksimr vim-jsbeautify  In the above link you have all the info    Install Configure  copy from the first example  Run  call HtmlBeautify     Does the job beautifully

User · Answer

None of the answers worked for me because all my HTML was in a single line  Basically you need first to break each line with the following command that substitutes  gt  lt  with the same characters but with a line break in the middle    s  gt  lt   gt  r lt  g  Then the command gg G  will indent the file

User · Answer

You can integrate both tidy and html-beautify automatically by installing the plugin vim-autoformat  After that  you can execute whichever formatter is installed with a single keystroke

User · Answer

The main problem using the smart indentation is that if the XML  or HTML  sits on one line as it may end up coming back from a curl request then gg G won t do the trick  Instead I have just experienced a good indentation using tidy directly called from VI     tidy -mi -xml -wrap 0     This basically tells VI to call tidy to cleanup an XML file not wrapping the lines to make them fit on the default 68 characters wide lines  I processed a large 29MB XML file and it took 5 or 6 seconds  I guess for an HTML file the command should therefore be     tidy -mi -html -wrap 0     As mentioned in comments  tidy is a basic tool which you could find on many base Linux   MacOS systems  Here is the projet s page in case you wish you had it but don t  HTML Tidy

User · Answer

There s several things that all need to be in place  Just to summarize them all in one location   Set the following option    filetype indent on  set filetype html             abbrev -   set ft html  set smartindent               abbrev -   set si   Then either move the cursor to the top of the file and indent to the end  gg  G Or select the desired text to indent and hit   to indent it

User · Answer

With filetype indent on inside my  vimrc  Vim indents HTML files quite nicely   Simple example with a shiftwidth of 2    lt html gt     lt body gt       lt p gt      text      lt  p gt     lt  body gt   lt  html gt

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