Dindent Laravel Package

Getting Started

Install via Composer: composer require gajus/dindent. The library is lightweight with a single public method: Dindent::render($html). Begin by wrapping your rendered Blade output or generated HTML string—e.g., in a test or debug route—to instantly get human-readable, indented markup. Start with unit tests where you assert against expected HTML snapshots; clean indentation makes mismatches visually obvious.

Implementation Patterns

• Test Harness Enhancement: Inject Dindent::render() into Pest/PHPUnit test helpers (after(fn () => dd(Dindent::render($response->getContent())))) to surface readable diffs on failure.
• Local Debug Middleware: Create a lightweight middleware (app/Http/Middleware/DindentHtml.php) that processes text/html responses in local environments only, replacing the content with indented HTML for developer tooling (e.g., browser devtools or CLI curl calls).
• Template Snippet Debugging: When building Blade partials via string concatenation (e.g., in emails or email templates), prepend output with Dindent::render() before return $view->render() or file_put_contents().
• CLI Utilities: Integrate into artisan commands that generate static HTML (e.g., php artisan generate:email-report) to improve inspectability of long output.

Gotchas and Tips

• Non-strict Parsing: Uses heuristic regex, not an HTML parser—malformed or missing closing tags (<div><span></div>) may misindent. Always normalize input (e.g., strip comments, enforce lowercase tags) before passing to render().
• Performance Overhead: Avoid in production or high-throughput flows; even small pages (~10KB) can see measurable latency if called repeatedly (e.g., in per-request response middleware). Use conditionally (if (app()->isLocal())).
• Self-Closing Tag Edge Cases: Tags like <br>, <img>, <input> may be misindented if not properly closed or space-padded (<br/> behaves better than <br>). Normalize HTML input (libxml_use_internal_errors(true) etc.) if possible.
• Case Sensitivity: Only lowercase tag names are handled reliably. If generating HTML from JSON or external APIs, downcase via strtolower() or regex pre-filtering.
• Extend with Caution: Its simplicity makes it easy to fork or wrap—but given the ambiguous NOASSERTION license, do not redistribute. Prefer embedding internally (e.g., as a service class) and audit the code before any deployment.