Free HTML Formatter Online

Format and beautify HTML code. Proper indentation, tag alignment, and syntax highlighting.

FreeNo SignupAPI Available

How to use the HTML Formatter

1
Open the HTML Formatter tool
2
Enter your data or upload your file
3
Adjust settings if needed
4
Get instant results
5
Download or copy your output

Frequently asked questions

Is the HTML Formatter free?

Yes, our html formatter is 100% free with no limits, no signup, and no watermarks.

Do I need to create an account?

No. You can use the html formatter without any registration. Just open it and start using it.

Is my data safe?

Yes. Any files you upload are automatically deleted after 5 minutes. We never store, share, or access your data.

Does this work on mobile?

Yes. The html formatter is fully responsive and works on phones, tablets, and desktops.

Is there an API for this?

Yes. All our tools are available as API endpoints for developers. Check our API documentation for details.

If you've just pulled markup from a page's view-source, exported it from an email builder, or scraped it from somewhere, there's a good chance it arrived as one dense, unreadable line — or the opposite, with inconsistent tabs and spaces from three different editors. An HTML formatter fixes that by re-indenting the document, aligning opening and closing tags, and laying nested elements out so the structure is actually visible at a glance. This tool does it live, right in the browser, with a side-by-side view so you can compare the raw input against the formatted result as you paste. What follows covers how it works, the situations where reformatting HTML actually saves time, what a straightforward formatter can and can't guarantee about broken markup, and how it stacks up against Prettier or your editor's built-in formatting command.

How the HTML Formatter Works

The layout is a dual-pane editor — raw HTML goes in on the left, formatted output appears on the right, and it updates continuously rather than waiting for you to press a button.

Paste your HTML into the input pane, or drop in an .html file directly.
The output pane reflows as you edit: each tag gets indented according to its nesting depth, and tags that were jammed onto a single line get broken out one per line so the document hierarchy reads top to bottom.
Void elements — <br>, <img>, <input>, <hr>, and the rest that never take a closing tag — are recognized correctly and formatted as self-contained lines rather than being treated like a container waiting for content.
Copy the formatted markup out of the output pane, or download it as an .html file once it's readable enough to work with.

The whole pass happens instantly, without any file leaving your machine. For teams that want the same reformatting applied automatically — say, as a step after scraping a batch of pages, or cleaning up markup pulled from a CMS export — the same functionality is reachable through the endpoint at /docs, which takes raw HTML and returns the formatted version programmatically.

Why Reformat HTML

Reformatting comes up more often than people expect, and rarely because someone's building a new page from scratch:

Cleaning up minified HTML from view-source. Production pages often ship as a single unbroken line of markup for transfer-size reasons. Reading or debugging that structure by eye is nearly impossible until it's reindented.
Formatting output from a WYSIWYG editor or email builder. These tools frequently generate HTML with inconsistent indentation, mixed tabs and spaces, or everything crammed onto a handful of lines — fine for rendering, painful for anyone who has to read it afterward.
Prettifying scraped markup for analysis. When you've pulled HTML from a page for parsing, testing, or documentation purposes, a readable structure makes it much easier to spot the elements and attributes you actually care about.
Preparing a snippet for code review or a pull request comment. Reviewers read indented, properly nested markup far faster than a wall of unbroken tags, especially when the change under review is buried three levels deep.
Turning a pasted Slack or docs snippet back into something usable. Chat tools and word processors routinely collapse whitespace when you paste code into them; running the result back through a formatter restores the structure before you drop it into a file.

What HTML Formatting Actually Does

At its core, formatting HTML means walking the tag structure and re-emitting it with indentation that mirrors nesting depth — a <div> inside a <section> inside a <body> gets three progressively deeper levels of indentation, and each tag that opens a new block starts its own line. This tool preserves the content inside <pre>, <script>, and <style> blocks verbatim rather than reformatting it, since reindenting the contents of those tags would actually change what they render or execute — a <pre> block's whitespace is meaningful, and JavaScript inside a <script> tag has its own syntax rules that a generic HTML reformatter has no business rewriting.

It's worth being direct about the boundary here: this is a formatter, not a validator, and not a repair tool. It reflows well-formed or mostly-well-formed markup into a readable shape; it does not fix a genuinely broken document — an unclosed tag, mismatched nesting, or invalid attribute syntax will format around the problem rather than silently correcting it. If you need to confirm a document is spec-valid, that's a separate step from formatting it.

Attribute order and quoting are left as they appear in the source rather than being normalized to a single convention. If one tag in the original uses double quotes around an attribute value and another uses single quotes, both are preserved rather than rewritten to match — the formatter's job here is indentation and line breaks, not attribute-level style enforcement. That's a deliberate scope decision: a tool that starts rewriting attribute quoting or reordering attributes is making judgment calls about style that belong to a project's own conventions, and a generic formatter has no way to know what those conventions are. The same logic applies to void elements written the self-closing, XHTML-style way — <br /> instead of <hr> — and to inline SVG markup, which follows standard XML-style tag rules and gets indented like any other nested element rather than needing special-case handling the way pre, script, and style blocks do.

Compared to a full tool like Prettier, this formatter is deliberately narrower in scope. Prettier ships with configuration for print width, attribute wrapping rules, and consistent handling of framework-specific template syntax, and it runs as part of an editor or CI setup once configured. This tool skips all of that configuration surface in exchange for something you can use in ten seconds without installing anything.

Deeply nested markup — a component tree exported from a design system, or a table generated by an old reporting tool with a dozen levels of nested divs — is exactly where formatting pays off the most, and also where it's most tempting to give up and read the minified version instead. Each additional nesting level just means one more increment of indentation; there's no practical depth limit the way there might be with a recursive parser that has to track state carefully to avoid stack issues. A doctype declaration, if the source includes one, is left at the top of the output exactly as written, since it isn't itself a tag that needs indenting.

Aspect	This Formatter	Prettier
Re-indents nested tags	Yes	Yes
Preserves pre/script/style content	Yes	Yes
Configurable print width / wrapping rules	No	Yes
Validates or repairs broken markup	No	No
Editor/CI integration	No	Yes
Setup needed	None — browser tab	npm install, config file

HTML Formatter vs Prettier and Editor Tools

Depending on how often you're formatting HTML and where, different tools make sense:

Prettier as an editor extension or pre-commit hook. The right call for an actual codebase, since it formats consistently on every save or commit without anyone thinking about it. It needs installation, a config file, and usually a project-level setup before it does anything.
Your browser's devtools "pretty-print" button. Handy for reading minified markup you're already inspecting in devtools, but it's read-only in context — getting the result out as a usable file means copying it elsewhere anyway.
Your code editor's "Format Document" command. Works well once you're already inside a project with the right extensions installed, but it's not something you'd reach for to format a snippet someone pasted into a Slack thread.
A browser-based HTML formatter. No install, no project context needed, works on any device, and handles a standalone snippet — pasted from anywhere — just as easily as a full document. It's not wired into a CI pipeline the way Prettier is, and it isn't meant to be; it's for the markup that isn't part of a formatted codebase yet.

If HTML formatting needs to happen automatically every time code is committed, set up Prettier once and let it run unattended. If you've got a one-off block of markup that needs to be readable right now, this tool gets there without any of that setup.

How Your Markup Is Processed

Formatting happens entirely inside your browser using JavaScript running locally — the HTML you paste or upload never gets sent to a server, and there's no copy of it retained once you close the tab or navigate elsewhere. That's worth knowing if the markup you're cleaning up includes anything sensitive, like an internal admin page or a client's unreleased email template, since the content simply stays on your machine throughout.

Common Questions About HTML Formatting

Does this validate my HTML?

No. Formatting and validation are different jobs — this tool reflows the indentation and structure of markup that's already reasonably well-formed, but it doesn't check the document against the HTML spec or flag invalid attributes and elements.

Will it fix broken or malformed HTML?

Not reliably. An unclosed tag or invalid nesting will format around the issue rather than repairing it, so the underlying problem is still there afterward — it'll just be easier to see once the surrounding markup is readable.

Does it support JSX or Vue template syntax?

It's built for standard HTML. JSX and Vue templates mix in framework-specific syntax — expressions in curly braces, directives — that a plain HTML formatter isn't designed to parse correctly.

Can I control the indentation size?

The tool applies a consistent default indentation rather than exposing a configuration panel. If you need a specific indent width or print-width rule enforced project-wide, that's the kind of setting Prettier's config file is built for.

Does formatting strip out my comments?

No — formatting and minifying are opposite operations. This tool preserves HTML comments and all existing content; it only changes whitespace and line breaks around tags. If you specifically want comments removed, that's a minification job, not a formatting one.

Is it safe to format a full HTML document, not just a snippet?

Yes. It handles a complete document — doctype, head, body, and everything nested inside — the same way it handles a small fragment; there's no practical size limit tied to using it in the browser, whether the input is a five-line fragment or a full exported page.

Related Tools

Once your markup is readable, related cleanup often follows. Shrink the same document back down for production with the CSS Minifier for its stylesheet or the JavaScript Minifier for any inline scripts. Writing content in Markdown that needs to become HTML in the first place? Markdown to HTML handles that conversion before this tool ever needs to touch the output. If a database-driven page is part of what you're documenting, the SQL Formatter cleans up the queries behind it the same way this tool cleans up the markup. And when you need to see exactly what changed between two versions of a page's markup, the Code Diff Tool lines them up side by side.