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 fil

Answer 1

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.