Is there such thing as Javascript Tidy?

November 12, 2005 8:19 AM

Is there a utility out there that does for Javascript code what HTML Tidy does for (X)HTML? I've started working with a bunch of Javascript code that's just messy as all hell, and would love to preprocess it into something a bit neater before buckling down and getting to work. Something online (similar to this online HTML Tidy interface) would be perfect, something *nix command-line would be good as well, and I guess an app that handled the cleanup would be fine (OS X preferred). This might be a no-brainer, but I've searched high and low without results...
posted by delfuego to computers & internet (5 comments total)

astyle cleans up Java and C/++.
posted by mnology at 8:32 AM on November 12, 2005

for programming languages, this kind of thing is called a pretty printer, but will only reformat, not detect errors. try here. via google javascript pretty printer
posted by andrew cooke at 8:33 AM on November 12, 2005

Andrew, that prettyprinter.de link is great; in my ten minutes of testing just now, its heuristics create some mildly weird output at times, but generally only because the JS that I'm throwing at it is really odd in places. It's perfect for the use I need right now... thanks!
posted by delfuego at 9:14 AM on November 12, 2005

GNU Indent might be suitable for reformatting basic JavaScript, though I don't know how well it would deal with some of the more esoteric features of the language that aren't shared with C.
posted by letourneau at 12:05 PM on November 12, 2005

ISTR that the Venkman debugger for Mozilla had a JS reformatter in it.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:13 PM on November 12, 2005