In response to this thread at WebDeveloper.com, I came up with the idea of using PHP’s Tidy functions to format the HTML output from a script. The basic idea was to capture all the output by using ob_start() to buffer the output and then ob_get_clean() to save it to a variable. Then just run it through the tidy_repair_string() function with a couple configuration settings to indent it.
<?php
ob_start();
?>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>test</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Test</h1>
<ul>
<li>This is a test.</li>
<li>It is only a test.</li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>
<?php
$text = ob_get_clean();
$config = array(
'indent' => true,
'indent-spaces' => 4
);
$text = tidy_repair_string($text, $config);
echo $text;
But (more…)