format xml, pretty print

Question

I know of two ways to "pretty print", or format, xml:

what other free (as in beer) formatters are there? (aside from using javascript)

Just for completeness and better discoverability I link to [pretty printing xml with javascript](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/376373/pretty-printing-xml-with-javascript) (which is probably the canonical SO thread regarding javascript solutions to this problem) — Martin, Jul 27 '21 at 11:00

score 15 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 09 '10 at 11:04

15

Well, the identity transform you linked to is portable to any XSLT processor (Saxon, msxml, etc).

Additionally, you could look at xmllint which is part of the LibXML2 toolkit. The --format option allows you to pretty print the input. Similar functionality exists in XMLStarlet (which uses LibXML2 under the hood iirc).

answered Nov 09 '10 at 11:04

Nic Gibson

7,051
4
31
40

1

Works great for strings too: `echo "" | xmllint --format -` – Matt Aug 20 '13 at 01:40

score 10 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 04 '11 at 23:15

xmlstarlet fo is what I use for pretty printing. Xmlstarlet has a number of options:

$ xmlstarlet fo --help
XMLStarlet Toolkit: Format XML document
Usage: xml fo [<options>] <xml-file>
where <options> are
  -n or --noindent            - do not indent
  -t or --indent-tab          - indent output with tabulation
  -s or --indent-spaces <num> - indent output with <num> spaces
  -o or --omit-decl           - omit xml declaration <?xml version="1.0"?>
  -R or --recover             - try to recover what is parsable
  -D or --dropdtd             - remove the DOCTYPE of the input docs
  -C or --nocdata             - replace cdata section with text nodes
  -N or --nsclean             - remove redundant namespace declarations
  -e or --encode <encoding>   - output in the given encoding (utf-8, unicode...)
  -H or --html                - input is HTML

A good XML engineer should be able to wield xmlstarlet.

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 25 '11 at 10:38

3

You can use http://prettydiff.com/?m=beautify Unfortunately, it is written in JavaScript, but it is a complete application so you never have to know that. Just know that you can run from inside your browser without downloading or installing anything.

answered Nov 25 '11 at 10:38

austincheney

1,097
7
8

score 1 · Answer 4 · edited Jul 18 '20 at 14:44

1

I like the java library XOM for XML manipulation. It has a nice Pretty Printer that provides a lot of control over the output.

edited Jul 18 '20 at 14:44

hoijui

3,615
2
33
41

answered Nov 09 '10 at 01:38

orangepips

9,891
6
33
57

Alex · Answer 5 · 2016-07-25T11:32:57.437

0

When using libxml2 in python:

with open(pathToSaveResult, 'w') as fd:
   xmlParsed.saveTo(fd,format = libxml2.XML_SAVE_FORMAT)

Edit: It looks like there is some bug in libxml2 ...pretty printing is done with the tag libxml2.XML_SAVE_NO_EMPTY instead of libxml2.XML_SAVE_FORMAT

edited Jul 25 '16 at 11:32

answered Jul 25 '16 at 10:14

Alex

1,602
20
33

format xml, pretty print

5 Answers5

Linked