Useful scripts - htmlind and xmlind

This is the forth post of a series describing simple scripts that I wrote to ease my life as a programmer.

In this post I'll describe 2 simple scripts to indent nicely HTML and XML files. I use them primarily with acme, to pipe selected text and get back nicely formatted output.

Code is available here: htmlind and xmlind. Both programs are written in Python and make use of specialized libraries freely available online. In particular, xmlind uses xml.dom.minidom, included in Python's standard library, and htmlind uses a modified version of BeautifulSoup.

The most interesting part of these script is the modification to BeautifulSoup, in order to support variable tabstop width in pretty printing. The patch is here: it basically allows a user to set tabstop width as an environmental variable ($tabstop) which defaults to "4".

For example:

% echo '<a><b>text text</b><c>more text</c></a>' | htmlind
<a>
    <b>
        text text
    </b>
    <c>
        more text
    </c>
</a>

% tabstop=1 echo '<a><b>text text</b><c>more text</c></a>' | htmlind
<a>
 <b>
  text text
 </b>
 <c>
  more text
 </c>
</a>