Quickly Reformat HTML in Visual Studio 2005

Provided by:  Dave Juth, Senior Systems Architect

The Visual Studio 2005 HTML editor has a feature that lets you automatically format HTML code with your preferences. From the Visual Studio Edit menu, select "Advanced", and then choose "Format Document" or "Format Selection" (or use the shortcuts "Ctrl+K, Ctrl+D" or "Ctrl+K, Ctrl+F" respectively):

Alternately, you can highlight the code that you want to format, right-click, and select “Format Selection”:

This applies the rules defined in Visual Studio for HTML code.

You can customize the rules to suit your preferences by choosing the “Formatting and Validation” option from the right-click menu. This opens the Options dialog to the HTML Format pane:

The following options are available on the HTML Format pane:

• Capitalization options for Server tag, Server attributes, Client tag, and Client attributes.

• Automatic formatting options to insert attribute value quotes when typing, insert attribute value quotes when formatting, and automatically insert close tags.

• Text wrapping options to let you specify whether to wrap text, and to specify the length before wrapping.

• Tag-specific options to customize how the HTML designer formats markup for individual tags.

Additional options are available on the other HTML panes:

See Tabs, HTML, Text Editor, Options Dialog Box for details.

Additional Resources

• Formatting Elements in the HTML Editor in Visual Web Developer

• Tag Specific Options

Return to the tips page