Format & Minify
How to Pretty-Print and Format XML for Readability
Pretty-print messy XML into clean, indented markup, or minify it back to one line. Learn XML formatting basics and format XML privately in your browser.
Try the toolXML Formatter →The problem: XML that arrives as one line
SOAP responses, RSS feeds, build artifacts, and exported config files almost always come as a single minified line of XML. Open one in an editor and you’re staring at a dense string of angle brackets with no visual structure — good for machines and bandwidth, hopeless for a human trying to find one element. Pretty-printing restores the nesting so you can actually read and edit it.
How XML formatting works
An XML formatter walks the document’s tree and re-emits it with one element per line, indented by nesting depth. Each time an element opens a child, the indentation increases; when it closes, it decreases. The result mirrors the document’s hierarchy visually:
- Every element sits on its own line at the correct depth.
- Attributes stay on the opening tag.
- Self-closing tags like
<br/>are preserved as-is. - Text content and
CDATAsections are kept intact.
The reverse operation, minifying, strips the added whitespace and collapses everything back to one line — ideal when you need to send XML over the wire or paste it into a field that expects compact input.
A practical walkthrough
Take this minified note document:
<note><to>Tove</to><from>Jani</from><body>Don't forget me</body></note>Formatted, its structure becomes obvious at a glance:
<note>
<to>Tove</to>
<from>Jani</from>
<body>Don't forget me</body>
</note>You can immediately see that note has three children. On a real 200-line SOAP envelope, that same indentation is the difference between finding the element you need in seconds versus scrolling through an unbroken string.
Common pitfalls
- Whitespace can be significant. In some documents the whitespace inside an element is meaningful (for example, mixed content or
xml:space="preserve"). Reformatting for readability can technically change that text, so don’t re-indent data whose whitespace matters. - Invalid XML won’t format. A missing closing tag or mismatched element will stop the parser. If formatting fails, you likely have a structural error to fix first.
- Namespaces are preserved, not resolved. A formatter keeps
ns:tagexactly as written — it doesn’t expand or validate namespaces. - Formatting isn’t schema validation. Pretty-printing says nothing about whether the document matches its DTD or XSD.
Format XML in your browser
The XML Formatter pretty-prints or minifies XML entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded, there’s no sign-up, and it’s free. Paste your document, choose format or minify, and copy the result. If you’d rather work with the data as objects, convert it with XML to JSON, and go the other way with JSON to XML when you need to produce XML from a JSON source.
Conclusion
Minified XML is efficient for machines but painful for people. A quick pass through a formatter restores the hierarchy, makes elements easy to find, and lets you edit confidently — then minify again when it’s time to ship. Keep the whitespace caveat in mind, and pretty-printing becomes a safe, everyday habit.