Every DBA knows that: SQL*Plus is a powerful tool, but its output is often almost unreadable. Do we have to format everything carefully with col commands or change to a more comfortable GUI instead? No! The early Tanel Poder has shown an easy way to get nice HTML output from SQL*Plus back in 2007 already:

http://blog.tanelpoder.com/2007/08/07/sqlplus-is-my-second-home-part-1-htmlizing-your-sqlplus-output/

I have adopted this idea and use it in my courses (also this week) whenever I need to do those queries on broad views like DBA_TABLESPACES or V$DATAFILE. I just run them in SQL*Plus as usual; if the output is unreadable, I call html.sql (First the SELECT, then simply @html), firefox opens and shows us a pretty looking HTML output, everybody is happy and the audience is stunned. Thank you, Tanel!

This is the adopted, slightly customized html.sql I use:

----------------------------------------
-- get the last SQL*Plus output in HTML
-- after Tanel Poder
----------------------------------------

set termout off

set markup HTML ON HEAD " -
 -
" -
BODY "" -
TABLE "border='1' align='center' summary='Script output'" -
SPOOL ON ENTMAP ON PREFORMAT OFF

spool myoutput.html

l
/

spool off
set markup html off spool off
host firefox myoutput.html
set termout on

Give it a try, it is really simple and much better readable then. Reminds us at the deprecated iSQL*Plus, doesn’t it