Can emacs re-indent a big blob of HTML for me?

Solution 1:

You can do sgml-pretty-print and then indent-for-tab on the same region/buffer, provided you are in html-mode or nxml-mode.

sgml-pretty-print adds new lines to proper places and indent-for-tab adds nice indentation. Together they lead to properly formatted html/xml.

Solution 2:

By default, when you visit a .html file in Emacs (22 or 23), it will put you in html-mode. That is probably not what you want. You probably want nxml-mode, which is seriously fancy. nxml-mode seems to only come with Emacs 23, although you can download it for earlier versions of emacs from the nXML web site. There is also a Debian and Ubuntu package named nxml-mode. You can enter nxml-mode with:

M-x nxml-mode

You can view nxml mode documentation with:

C-h i g (nxml-mode) RET

All that being said, you will probably have to use something like Tidy to re-format your xhtml example. nxml-mode will get you from

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head></head>
<body>
<table>
  <tr>
<td>blah</td></tr></table>
</body>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head></head>
  <body>
    <table>
      <tr>
    <td>blah</td></tr></table>
</body>
</html>

but I don't see a more general facility to do line breaks on certain xml tags as you want. Note that C-j will insert a new line with proper indentation, so you may be able to do a quick macro or hack up a defun that will do your tables.

Can emacs re-indent a big blob of HTML for me?

Solution 1:

Solution 2:

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