How do I pretty-print HTML with Nokogiri?

This worked for me:

 pretty_html = Nokogiri::HTML(html).to_xhtml(indent: 3) 

I tried the REXML version above, but it corrupted some of my documents. And I hate to bring xslt into a new project. Both feel antiquated. :)

By "pretty printing" of HTML page I presume you meant that you want to reformat the HTML structure with proper indentation. Nokogiri doesn't support this; the pretty_print method is for the "pp" library and the output is useful for debugging only.

There are several projects that understand HTML well enough to be able to reformat it without destroying whitespace that is actually significant (the famous one is HTML Tidy), but by Googling I've found this post titled "Pretty printing XHTML with Nokogiri and XSLT".

It comes down to this:

xsl = Nokogiri::XSLT(File.open("pretty_print.xsl"))
html = Nokogiri(File.open("source.html"))
puts xsl.apply_to(html).to_s

It requires you, of course, to download the linked XSL file to your filesystem. I've tried it very quickly on my machine and it works like a charm.

You can try REXML:

require "rexml/document"

doc = REXML::Document.new(xml)
doc.write($stdout, 2)

The answer by @mislav is somewhat wrong. Nokogiri does support pretty-printing if you:

• Parse the document as XML
• Instruct Nokogiri to ignore whitespace-only nodes ("blanks") during parsing
• Use to_xhtml or to_xml to specify pretty-printing parameters

In action:

html = '<section>
<h1>Main Section 1</h1><p>Intro</p>
<section>
<h2>Subhead 1.1</h2><p>Meat</p><p>MOAR MEAT</p>
</section><section>
<h2>Subhead 1.2</h2><p>Meat</p>
</section></section>'

require 'nokogiri'
doc = Nokogiri::XML(html,&:noblanks)
puts doc
#=> <section>
#=>   <h1>Main Section 1</h1>
#=>   <p>Intro</p>
#=>   <section>
#=>     <h2>Subhead 1.1</h2>
#=>     <p>Meat</p>
#=>     <p>MOAR MEAT</p>
#=>   </section>
#=>   <section>
#=>     <h2>Subhead 1.2</h2>
#=>     <p>Meat</p>
#=>   </section>
#=> </section>

puts doc.to_xhtml( indent:3, indent_text:"." )
#=> <section>
#=> ...<h1>Main Section 1</h1>
#=> ...<p>Intro</p>
#=> ...<section>
#=> ......<h2>Subhead 1.1</h2>
#=> ......<p>Meat</p>
#=> ......<p>MOAR MEAT</p>
#=> ...</section>
#=> ...<section>
#=> ......<h2>Subhead 1.2</h2>
#=> ......<p>Meat</p>
#=> ...</section>
#=> </section>