# Dindent
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[](https://coveralls.io/r/gajus/dindent?branch=master)
[](https://packagist.org/packages/gajus/dindent)
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Dindent (aka., "HTML beautifier") will indent HTML for development and testing. Dedicated for those who suffer from reading a template engine produced markup.
Try it in the [sandbox](http://gajus.com/sandbox/dindent/sandbox/).
## Abuse Case
Dindent will not sanitize or otherwise manipulate your output beyond indentation.
If you are looking to remove malicious code or make sure that your document is standards compliant, consider the following alternatives:
* [HTML Purifier](https://github.com/Exercise/HTMLPurifierBundle)
* [DOMDocument::$formatOutput](http://www.php.net/manual/en/class.domdocument.php)
* [Tidy](http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.tidy.php)
If you need to indent your code in the development environment, beware that earlier mentioned libraries will attempt to fix your markup (that's their primary purpose; indentation is a by-product).
## Regex
There is a [good reason not to use regular expression to parse HTML](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454). However, DOM parser will rebuild the whole HTML document. It will add missing tags, close open block tags, or remove anything that's not a valid HTML. This is what Tidy does, DOM, etc. This behavior is undesirable when debugging HTML output. Regex based parser will not rebuild the document. Dindent will only add indentation, without otherwise affecting the markup.
The above is also the reason why [Chrome DevTools](https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/) is not a direct replacement for Dindent.
## Use
```php
$indenter = new \Gajus\Dindent\Indenter();
$indenter->indent('[..]');
```
In the above example, `[..]` is a placeholder for:
```html
| A cell test! |
|
| Test Ce ll |
| Cell | Cell | Cell |
```
Dindent will convert it to:
```HTML
| A cell test! |
|
| Test Ce ll |
| Cell |
Cell |
Cell |
```
## Options
`Indenter` constructor accepts the following options that control indentation:
|Name|Description|
|---|---|
|`indentation_character`|Character(s) used for indentation. Defaults to 4 whitespace characters.|
### Set element type
HTML elements are either "inline" elements or "block-level" elements.
An inline element occupies only the space bounded by the tags that define the inline element. The following example demonstrates the inline element's influence:
```html
This is an inline element within a block element.
```
A block-level element occupies the entire space of its parent element (container), thereby creating a "block." Browsers typically display the block-level element with a new line both before and after the element. The following example demonstrates the block-level element's influence:
```html
This is a block element within a block element.
```
Dindent identifies the following elements as "inline":
* b, big, i, small, tt
* abbr, acronym, cite, code, dfn, em, kbd, strong, samp, var
* a, bdo, br, img, span, sub, sup
This is a subset of the inline elements defined in the [MDN](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Inline_elemente).
All other elements are treated as block.
You can set element type to either block or inline using `setElementType` method:
```php
$indenter = new \Gajus\Dindent\Indenter();
/**
* @param string $element_name Element name, e.g. "b".
* @param ELEMENT_TYPE_BLOCK|ELEMENT_TYPE_INLINE $type
* @return null
*/
$indenter->setElementType('foo', \Gajus\Dindent\Indenter::ELEMENT_TYPE_BLOCK);
$indenter->setElementType('bar', \Gajus\Dindent\Indenter::ELEMENT_TYPE_INLINE);
```
# CLI
Dindent can be used via the CLI script `./bin/dindent.php`.
```sh
php ./bin/dindent.php
Indent HTML.
Options:
--input=./input_file.html
Input file
--indentation_character=" "
Character(s) used for indentation. Defaults to 4 whitespace characters.
--inline
A list of comma separated "inline" element names.
--block
A list of comma separated "block" element names.
Examples:
./dindent.php --input="./input.html"
Indent "input.html" file and print the output to STDOUT.
./dindent.php --input="./input.html" | tee ./output.html
Indent "input.html" file and dump the output to "output.html".
./dindent.php --input="./input.html" --indentation_character="\t"
Indent "input.html" file using tab to indent the markup.
./dindent.php --input="./input.html" --inline="div,p"
Indent "input.html" file treating and
elements as inline.
./dindent.php --input="./input.html" --block="span,em"
Indent "input.html" file treating and elements as block.
```
## Known issues
* Does not treat comments nicely and IE conditional blocks.
## Installation
The recommended way to use Dindent is through [Composer](https://getcomposer.org/).
```json
{
"require": {
"gajus/dindent": "2.0.*"
}
}
```