Format HTML prior to serving the page

Question

Hey There

I am using ASP.NET-MVC, and would like to format my html prior to sending it to the browser.

I have one page with multiple partialviews, and i want it all to be indented nicely.

I know this is stupid, but while in development it's nice to have well formatted html when you go: RightClick -> View Source.

Does anyone know of a way to do this?

Answer 1

I don't know if this is possible - it certainly does not seem practical - it would be a lot of formatting work on every page when you will only occasionally use view source.

I would suggest selecting a different text editor to do your view source, and then use the editor's formatting tools to format the html. I use TextPad and while the html formatting isn't fabulous, it does help. I am sure there are other editors you could try for this.

Answer 2

In Java, there the HTML Tidy/JTidy is for. There are ports available in PHP and ASP.NET as well.

Answer 3

Have a look at this blog post: ASP.NET MVC clean HTML

I think it's exactly what you're looking for. The author uses ActionFilters and Tidy.NET to format the HTML output.

Answer 4

You can either inject code that gets executed every single request, with attendant risks or overhead. Or you could get better tools.