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

Answer 1

Tidy can do what you want, but only for whole buffer it seems (and the result is XHTML)

M-x tidy-buffer

Answer 2

http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/emacs/emacs_277.html

After selecting the region you want to fix. (To select the whole buffer use C-x h)

C-M-q

Reindent all the lines within one parenthetical grouping(indent-sexp).

C-M-\

Reindent all lines in the region (indent-region).

Answer 3

i wrote a function myself to do this for xml, which works well in nxml-mode. should work pretty well for html as well:

(defun jta-reformat-xml ()
  "Reformats xml to make it readable (respects current selection)."
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (let ((beg (point-min))
          (end (point-max)))
      (if (and mark-active transient-mark-mode)
          (progn
            (setq beg (min (point) (mark)))
            (setq end (max (point) (mark))))
        (widen))
      (setq end (copy-marker end t))
      (goto-char beg)
      (while (re-search-forward ">\\s-*<" end t)
        (replace-match ">\n<" t t))
      (goto-char beg)
      (indent-region beg end nil))))

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

You can do a replace regexp

 M-x replace-regexp

 \(</[^>]+>\)

 \1C-q-j

Indent the whole buffer

 C-x h
 M-x indent-region

Answer 6

In emacs 25, which I'm currently building from source, assuming you are in HTML mode, use
Ctrl-x
h

to select all, and then press Tab.