XML Formatter

How to format XML

1. Paste your XML, or click Open a file to load an .xml, .svg, .xsd, .xsl, RSS or other XML file (up to 10 MB).
2. Choose the Indentation: 2 spaces, 4 spaces or a tab.
3. Click Format (beautify) for readable, indented XML, or Minify for the most compact version. Validate only checks the document and leaves the result as it is.
4. Tick Remove comments to drop <!-- … --> comments from the result.
5. Copy or download the result.

Every action first checks that the document is well-formed. If it is not, nothing is changed and the error message gives the line and column of the problem.

What the formatter does

Format (beautify) puts each element on its own line, indented by its depth:

<catalog>
  <book id="1">
    <title>XML &amp; you</title>
    <tags/>
  </book>
</catalog>

• An element that only contains text stays on one line, like <title> above; surrounding whitespace in that text is trimmed.
• Attributes keep their order, their values and their quote style; only the spaces between them are normalised.
• Comments, CDATA sections, processing instructions and the XML declaration are kept.
• An element with xml:space="preserve" is copied exactly as written, whitespace included.
• Entities such as & or é are left untouched: the text is never decoded and re-encoded.

Minify removes the whitespace between tags and, if ticked, the comments. Text content is kept as is. The status line shows the size before and after, in bytes.

What “well-formed” means

A well-formed XML document follows the syntax rules of XML 1.0:

• there is exactly one root element;
• every opening tag has a matching closing tag, properly nested (<a><b></b></a>, never <a><b></a></b>), or is self-closing (<br/>);
• attribute values are quoted, and the same attribute does not appear twice on an element;
• < and & in text are escaped as < and &;
• names are case-sensitive: <Title> is not closed by </title>.

The check uses the XML parser built into your browser, so the error messages for the less common cases (undeclared entities, invalid characters, namespace prefixes) come from the browser itself and are written in its language. Being well-formed is not the same as being valid against a DTD or an XSD schema: this tool does not check schemas.