ℹ️ About Code Formatter
Code Formatter pretty-prints or minifies HTML, CSS, and JavaScript snippets. Formatting adds consistent indentation and line breaks so source code is easier to scan, review, and debug. Minifying removes unnecessary whitespace and, when requested, comments so code is smaller for production delivery.
Use it when you need to format copied page markup, expand compressed CSS from a stylesheet, clean up JavaScript before review, compare readable and minified versions of a snippet, or prepare small HTML/CSS/JS fragments for examples, documentation, build pipelines, and troubleshooting.
HTML formatting and minifying:
- Separates tags and text content onto readable lines with nested indentation.
- Preserves document structure such as
<!DOCTYPE html>, elements, attributes, and inline text. - Minifies by tightening whitespace between tags and trimming leading or trailing spaces.
CSS formatting and minifying:
- Breaks rules around braces and semicolons for selectors, declarations, and at-rules.
- Indents nested blocks such as media queries and keyframes.
- Minifies by removing extra spaces around CSS punctuation such as
{ },:,;, and selector combinators.
JavaScript formatting and minifying:
- Splits common statement and block delimiters such as semicolons, braces, and function blocks onto separate lines.
- Indents nested blocks for functions, conditionals, loops, object literals, and similar brace-delimited code.
- Minifies by collapsing whitespace around common JavaScript operators, braces, parentheses, and separators.
Technical details: The formatter uses language-specific token and whitespace rules for HTML tags, CSS rule blocks, and JavaScript statement/block delimiters. It is intended for practical snippet cleanup, not standards conformance validation or AST-preserving refactoring. For the underlying language syntax, see the WHATWG HTML Standard, CSS Syntax Module Level 3, and ECMA-262 ECMAScript specification.
Examples: HTML like <div><span>Hello</span></div> is expanded into
nested lines. CSS like body{margin:0;color:#fff;} becomes one declaration per line when formatted, or
tight production CSS when minified. JavaScript like function demo(){if(ok){run();}} is split around
blocks and statements for easier reading.
Limitations and safety: The tool does not execute pasted code, but it also does not validate that the output is syntactically identical for every edge case. Template languages, JSX, malformed markup, regular expressions, string literals containing code-like punctuation, and unusual comment placement can need review after formatting or minifying. Do not paste secrets, private keys, credentials, or proprietary code unless you are comfortable processing that data here.
Privacy: The interactive formatter runs in your browser as you type. The public API uses the same tool logic server-side only when you explicitly send a request to the API endpoint.
API Usage Example:
POST /api/tools/webdev/code-formatter
Content-Type: application/json
{
"code": "body { color: red; margin: 0; }",
"language": "css",
"action": "minify",
"options": {
"indentSize": "4",
"maxLineLength": 100,
"preserveComments": true
}
}