Tidy Dog™

Purpose and practical uses

A formatter answers a narrow question: how should this supported syntax be laid out? It does not answer whether the program is correct, secure or efficient. Use Tidy Dog when reviewing a compact example, preparing a readable code excerpt, or comparing the style of two versions. Language detection is useful when a filename is missing, but it is a hypothesis to inspect rather than evidence about who wrote the file.

A deliberate workflow

Keep the original snippet, then choose Detect language to inspect the candidates. Select a manual language when you already know the destination grammar. Choose indentation, print width, quote preference and semicolon preference before running Tidy code. Some formatting choices belong to a language and may not affect other formats. Use Format + diff when you need to review the proposed changes rather than simply receive a replacement.

Treat the preview as a review stage. Look at string literals, embedded markup and comments before adopting the result. Copy or download only after checking diagnostics. If formatting fails, narrow the input to a complete expression or document in the selected language. An incomplete fragment can be useful for detection while still being invalid for a parser-backed formatter.

A practical example

For a documentation task, start with the built-in TypeScript greeting example. Run detection, explicitly select TypeScript, and compare the formatted function with the original. Change only the indentation setting and run it again. This isolates presentation from program logic. Repeat with a valid JSON object to see why a JSON document needs a different parser from a JavaScript object literal.

Limits and troubleshooting

The detection list is broader than the formatting list. Languages such as Python or Rust may be recognized without having a formatter here. A refusal to format an unsupported language is intentional; changing the filename or choosing an unrelated parser does not add support. Detection scores are heuristic rankings, not calibrated confidence probabilities. Polyglot documents can legitimately resemble several languages.

Formatting does not execute tests or prove semantic equivalence. Before replacing source in a project, inspect the differences and run that project’s existing checks. Preserve licensing comments where required. For production bundles, a separate minifier addresses size; making a snippet readable and making it compact are different jobs, even when both change whitespace.