XML Formatter
Beautify or minify XML with tag-pair validation and error locating; declarations, comments and CDATA all handled.
>_ USAGE GUIDE
Paste XML and beautify it with indentation — every child element on its own line, hierarchy crystal clear — or compress it to a single line for compact transmission, both in real time. Parsing includes automatic tag-pair validation: a missing closing tag or mismatched case is located precisely, so you never count brackets by eye again.
- Paste the XML: any document, from config snippets to full SOAP envelopes
- Beautify or compress: expand for reading and editing, squash for transport
- Follow the error pointer: malformed tags are flagged with their position
Declarations, comments, and CDATA sections are all handled correctly — CDATA content is preserved verbatim and never altered. The tool fits daily work with legacy interfaces (many government and banking systems still speak XML), Android layout files, and RSS or SOAP messages. The error pointer also makes it a quick first-pass checker for hand-edited config files before they reach a stricter schema validator. Parsing runs locally with zero uploads.
>_ FAQ
Q1 · XML versus JSON — and does anyone still use XML?
Both are structured data formats. JSON is lightweight and dominates modern web APIs; XML is more expressive — attributes, namespaces, mixed content, Schema validation — and remains standard in government and enterprise interfaces, SOAP services, Android layouts, Office documents (docx/xlsx are XML inside), and RSS. This is not replacement but division of labor.
Q2 · The tool reports mismatched tags — how do I fix them fast?
Frequent culprits: opening and closing tag names differing in case (<Name> vs </name>), malformed self-closing syntax (should be <br/>), and crossed nesting (<a><b></a></b>). The validator points at the offending position so you can fix it directly. For structurally complex documents, beautify first — with the hierarchy expanded, errors surface much faster.
Q3 · What is CDATA, and will formatting touch its contents?
CDATA (<![CDATA[...]]>) marks its contents as plain text, so < and & inside need no escaping — the standard wrapper for embedded code and symbol-heavy payloads. Both beautify and compress keep CDATA contents byte-for-byte intact; nothing inside is expanded or rewritten.
Q4 · Attributes or child elements — are <a b="1"> and <a><b>1</b></a> the same?
They can express the same fact, but conventions differ: attributes suit short metadata (id, type); child elements suit structured, repeatable content. Attributes cannot repeat and cannot contain structure. When maintaining someone else's XML, keep their style — many parsers bind values by attribute name, and converting attributes to elements breaks those mappings.
Q5 · Why did the compressed XML sometimes get bigger?
Most XML bulk is indentation whitespace, which compression removes — that is where the savings come from. If the document was already a single line, there is nothing left to strip, and CDATA plus comments are preserved by rule. For real size reduction, gzip the transport rather than fighting the XML layer.