XML Formatter and Minifier

Paste a document and choose what you want back. The output updates as you type.

1. Paste your XML into the Input box, or press Paste. Try it loads a short example.
2. Set Mode to Beautify to put each element on its own line, or to Minify to remove the line breaks and indentation between elements.
3. Choose the Indent: 2 spaces, 4 spaces or Tab. It only affects Beautify.
4. Read the status line. For good input it reads "Well-formed XML" with the root element and the number of elements. For bad input it says "Not well-formed" and quotes the browser parser, usually with a line and column.
5. Press Copy or Download .txt. Use as input moves the result back into the input box.

The document is parsed by the XML parser built into your browser and is never uploaded, so SOAP envelopes, exports and configuration files stay on your machine.

A document is well-formed when it follows the syntax rules: one root element, every start tag closed by a matching end tag, correct nesting, quoted attribute values, no repeated attributes, and only the five predefined entities (&, <, >, " and ') unless others are declared. It is valid when it also matches a schema, such as an XSD or DTD, that lists which elements and attributes are allowed.

This tool checks well-formedness only. The messages come from the browser, so wording varies, but these are the ones you will meet most:

• <a>x & y</a> fails because a bare ampersand must be written as &.
• <a><b></a> fails with an opening and ending tag mismatch.
• <a>&nbsp;</a> fails with "Entity nbsp not defined", because nbsp is an HTML entity, not an XML one.
• <a/><b/> fails with extra content at the end, since there are two root elements.

The tool parses the document and writes it out again, so it is a rewrite, not a whitespace edit. In the example, <a><b>1</b><c/></a> becomes four lines, with b and c indented one level under a. Elements that contain only text stay on one line. These details are worth knowing before you save the result:

• Spaces at the start and end of text are trimmed, and text that is only whitespace between elements is dropped.
• In mixed content, such as <p>Hello <b>world</b> again</p>, Beautify puts the text and the child element on separate lines, and Minify joins them as Hello<b>world</b>again. The spaces are lost, so do not use the tool on text where those spaces matter.
• Empty elements are always written as self-closing, so <empty></empty> becomes <empty/>.
• Single-quoted attributes get double quotes, and attribute order is kept.
• Comments, CDATA sections, processing instructions and the XML declaration are kept, and CDATA content is not touched.
• A DOCTYPE line is not carried over to the output.
• Quotation marks inside text are written as ".

XML is less fashionable than JSON, but a lot of everyday files are XML and arrive as one unreadable line. SOAP and older web service responses, RSS and Atom feeds, XML sitemaps, Maven pom.xml and .csproj files, Android layouts, SVG graphics and Office documents, which are zipped XML, all benefit from indentation before you read or review them.

Beautify before a code review or when hunting for one field in a response, and Minify before embedding a snippet in a string. If the markup is HTML rather than XML, the HTML formatter is more forgiving, because HTML allows unclosed tags that XML rejects. Use the diff checker to compare two formatted versions, and the JSON formatter if the same data is also offered as JSON. The URL encoder and decoder helps when an XML value has been percent-encoded.