How it works
The XML Formatter (XML Beautifier) takes compact or unformatted XML and adds proper indentation and line breaks to make its element hierarchy visible and readable.
XML is used extensively: SOAP web services, RSS/Atom feeds, SVG files, Android layouts, Maven and Gradle build files, Microsoft Office file formats (DOCX, XLSX are ZIP files containing XML), configuration files, and data interchange between enterprise systems. Minified or machine-generated XML is difficult to navigate without formatting.
How to use it: paste any well-formed XML. The formatter validates it first — a clear error message shows malformed input. Valid XML is formatted with 2-space indentation per nesting level, each element on its own line (except text-only leaf nodes), attribute values preserved exactly, and the XML declaration (<?xml version="1.0"?>) kept on the first line.
Handling different content: elements containing only text (leaf nodes) keep their content inline. Elements containing only other elements (structural nodes) expand with each child on its own line. Mixed content (elements containing both text and child elements) is handled conservatively to preserve whitespace semantics.
CDATA preservation: content inside CDATA sections (<!-- ![CDATA[ ... ]]>) is left completely unchanged — the formatter never processes CDATA content since it may contain characters that would be altered by normalization.
Frequently Asked Questions
- The formatter checks that the XML is well-formed (properly nested tags, correct attribute quoting, valid entity references). It does not validate against a DTD or XML Schema (XSD). A separate XML validator is needed for schema validation.
- Yes. Namespace prefixes and xmlns declarations are preserved exactly — the formatter does not alter or normalize namespace handling.
- CDATA sections (<![CDATA[...]]>) are preserved completely unchanged. The content inside CDATA is not formatted or processed in any way.
- Yes. SOAP envelopes are XML and format correctly. The SOAP namespace prefix and envelope/body/header structure are preserved with proper indentation.