What changes in this tool
Indent a CSS stylesheet to reveal rules and declarations. Indentation and line breaks expose structure while preserving the supported input tokens. Use this on a short stylesheet whose selectors and declarations have been squeezed together. The result places each rule and declaration on its own line. It does not sort properties or decide whether a selector is used; those are different tasks.
Know the format
CSS consists of selectors, at-rules, declaration blocks, values and comments. A space between selectors can express a descendant relationship, so removing every space would change which elements receive a rule. Strings, functions such as calc(), custom properties and embedded URLs can also contain punctuation that resembles a delimiter. This formatter scans strings, comments and nesting before changing layout; it does not evaluate the cascade, vendor extensions or browser support. The compact version removes ordinary comments and selected layout spaces around punctuation. It is intentionally less aggressive than a production CSS minifier. Check a page that uses the stylesheet after copying the result.
A dependable workflow
Formatting is most useful during review or debugging, when indentation can expose a missing nesting level or an unexpected sibling. Paste a complete, representative fragment and run the formatter once. Read the output from the outermost structure inward, paying attention to where each element, block or clause begins and ends. This page deliberately avoids pretending to be a compiler for every possible extension of the language. It may reject source whose meaning depends on advanced constructs. After copying the result, run the normal validator or test suite for the project in which it will be used. If you plan to commit the formatted text, inspect the diff so changes in layout do not hide an accidental change in a literal or data value.
Check the result
Keep the original next to the output and test a small known example before handling a large document. Compare meaningful content, not only file size or the number of lines. Check names, quoted strings, non-ASCII characters, line endings and any repeated fields after the transformation. A syntactically readable result does not validate a schema, prove that code executes, or establish that data is safe to publish. This site processes the entered text in the browser and displays the result as text, but the copy you paste into another application will follow that application’s rules. If the tool rejects an input, do not remove unexplained characters merely to get an output: identify which construct is outside the supported subset and use a dedicated parser when necessary.