Auto format (tabbed layout) .HTML pages with vim

Auto indentation with vim

Or: How do I tidy up an HTML file's indentation in Vi / Vim?

A great little function that vim is able to perform, providing it is enabled in your /etc/vimrc (or .vimrc) config file.

.vimrc config file changes

Just add:

filetype indent on

to /etc/vimrc or .vimrc

Press 'ESC' and type gg=G to auto-format your vim/vi document.

Example html page before auto formatting

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<p>text</p>
</body>
</html>

Example html page after auto formatting

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
        <head>
                <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
        </head>
        <body>
                <p>text</p>
        </body>
</html>

This function can help you locate missing HTML closing tags

The following example has been auto formatted using gg=G

Because the closing </head> tag is missing, the indentaion is messed up and it's pretty easy to spot where you went wrong.

On a simple page this is trivial, but this really helps out on massive pages.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
        <head>
                <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
                <body>
                        <p>text</p>
                </body>
        </html>

This function works with most programming/ coding languages that vim/ vi 'knows about'.

Vim / Vi has indentation rules for the following coding / programming languages

This function works with most programming/ coding languages that vim/ vi has indentation rules for.

The same languages are also likely to have vim/vi colour syntax highlighting also:

Ant, Automake, Awk, Bib, Bst, Cdl, Changelog, Ch, Cmake, Cobol, Config, Cpp, Css, Cs, C, Dictconf, Dictdconf, Docbk, Dtd, Dtrace, D, Dylan, Eiffel, Erlang, Eruby, Eterm, Fortran, Framescript, GenericIndent, Gitconfig, Haml, Hamster, Htmldjango, Html, Idlang, Ishd, Javascript, Java, Jsp, Ld, Lisp, Logtalk, Lua, Make, Matlab, Mma, Mp, Mupad, Objc, Ocaml, Occam, Pascal, Perl, Php, Postscr, Pov, Prolog, Pyrex, Python, Readline, Rpl, Rst, Ruby, Sass, Scheme, Sdl, Sh, Sml, Sqlanywhere, Sql, Tcl, Tcsh, Tf, Tilde, Vb, Verilog, Vhdl, Xf86conf, Xhtml, Xinetd, Xml, Xsd, Xslt, Yacc, Zsh

An example of Perl auto-indeted using gg=G

sub init($)
{   my ($self, $args) = @_;

        unless(keys %list)   # already read
        {   local $_;
                local $/  = "\n";

                my $rewind = tell DATA;
                while(<DATA>)
                {   chomp;
                        next if !length $_ or substr($_, 0, 1) eq '#';

                        my $os = s/^(\w+)\:// ? qr/$1/i : undef;
                        my ($type, $extensions, $encoding) = split /\;/;

                        next if $args->{only_complete} && ! $extensions;
                        my $extent = $extensions ? [ split /\,/, $extensions ] : undef;

                        my $simplified = MIME::Type->simplified($type);
                        push @{$list{$simplified}}, MIME::Type->new
                        ( type       => $type
                                , extensions => $extent
                                , encoding   => $encoding
                                , system     => $os
                        );
                }
                seek DATA, $rewind, 0;  # for forked/mod_perl when badly implemented
        }

        $self;
}