What Is the XML Formatter?
Format and prettify XML documents with proper indentation, syntax highlighting, and validation. Collapse or expand nodes for easier navigation.
Why Use This Tool?
Raw XML from APIs, config files, or data exports is often minified or poorly formatted. This tool adds proper indentation and structure so you can read and debug XML documents quickly.
How to Use This XML Formatter
- Paste your XML — Enter raw, minified, or messy XML into the input area.
- Click Format — The tool parses the XML tree and outputs it with proper indentation, line breaks, and consistent attribute formatting.
- Set indentation — Choose 2-space, 4-space, or tab indentation to match your project conventions.
- Copy the result — Click Copy to grab the formatted XML for your configuration files, SOAP responses, or data documents.
Tips and Best Practices
- → Format before debugging. Minified or poorly indented XML is nearly impossible to read. Always format first, then diagnose issues.
- → Validate after formatting. A formatter makes XML readable, but it doesn't guarantee validity. Use an XML validator to check for well-formedness and schema compliance.
- → XML is case-sensitive. Unlike HTML, XML tag names are case-sensitive.
<Name>and<name>are different elements. - → Use CDATA for embedded content. Wrap content containing special characters (like HTML or code snippets) in
<![CDATA[ ... ]]>to avoid escaping issues.
Common Use Cases
Inspecting a SOAP response or a sitemap before deciding whether something's wrong with the upstream service or with your parsing. Auditing an sitemap.xml or RSS feed for malformed entities and missing namespaces before pushing it live (and before search engines or feed readers complain about well-formedness errors that block ingestion entirely).
Pretty-printing minified XML from a config-management export so you can review the diff against the previous version. Validating that an XSLT-produced document closes every tag and quotes every attribute correctly before downstream consumers parse it. Reformatting AndroidManifest.xml, pom.xml, or similar build-system files after a tooling merge has flattened the whitespace. Inspecting SVG source for rogue inline styles or stray namespaces before optimization.
How We Compare
Notepad++ and VS Code both have XML formatting plugins; they work well for one-off files but require an install and IDE setup. Online XML formatters from xmlformatter.org and similar handle the same job but upload your document to their server, which is awkward when the XML contains API responses, internal identifiers, or partner data.
This tool runs entirely in the browser using a DOM-based parse-and-reserialize pipeline, so structure is normalized and validation errors surface before formatting. Indentation, attribute alignment, and self-closing tag handling are all configurable. For JSON instead of XML, see JSON formatter; the same principle applies to a different syntax.
Frequently Asked Questions
Built by Derek Giordano · Part of Ultimate Design Tools