XML Formatter

Make Any XML Readable With Proper Indentation in One Click

XML generated by SOAP services, API responses, configuration exports, sitemaps, data feeds, and system integrations typically arrives without any whitespace formatting. A complex XML document crammed onto one line—or spread across lines with erratic indentation from a code generator—is almost impossible to read, navigate, or debug without formatting it first. Our free XML formatter takes any syntactically valid XML and outputs it with clean, hierarchical indentation where every element is properly indented relative to its parent, making the document structure immediately visible and navigable.

Paste your XML, click Format, and the readable output is ready to copy. The formatter also works as a quick well-formedness validator—if your XML contains syntax errors (unclosed tags, missing quotes on attributes, invalid characters), the formatter reports the error before attempting to format, giving you immediate feedback on what needs to be fixed.

What XML Formatting Does to Your Document

XML formatting is a structural transformation that modifies only whitespace—it adds newlines and indentation to reflect the element hierarchy without changing any tag names, attribute values, text content, or document structure. A formatted XML document and its unformatted equivalent parse to identical data structures in any XML parser. The formatting exists entirely for human readability.

Standard XML formatting conventions: the opening tag of each element on its own line; child elements indented one level deeper than their parent; closing tags on their own line at the same indentation level as the opening tag; text content inline with the element when it's short; multi-line text content handled according to whitespace preservation rules. The XML declaration (``) stays on the first line.

When You Need an XML Formatter Most

Working With SOAP Web Services

SOAP request and response payloads are XML. The envelopes, headers, and body elements in a SOAP message nest deeply, and without formatting, even a moderately complex SOAP response is a wall of text that makes debugging endpoint behavior genuinely painful. When a SOAP integration is behaving unexpectedly, formatting the raw request and response XML is typically the first step—it transforms the opaque payload into a navigable structure where you can identify exactly which element contains the unexpected value or missing field.

Inspecting RSS and Atom Feeds

News sites, podcasts, and blogs publish content through RSS and Atom feeds in XML format. When debugging a feed that's not updating correctly in an aggregator, or when checking what metadata a feed exposes to podcast directories, formatting the raw feed XML makes it immediately readable and navigable. Items, titles, descriptions, publication dates, and media enclosures all become clearly visible in the formatted structure.

Reading Configuration Files

Java applications, Android projects, Maven build files, Spring Framework configurations, Ant build scripts, and many enterprise application configurations use XML. These files frequently arrive without consistent formatting from code generation tools, older IDEs, or manual editing. Running them through the formatter produces clean, readable files that are much easier to understand, compare, and modify.

Debugging Data Feeds and Imports

E-commerce product feeds, ERP data exports, and system integration payloads are often XML. When a data import fails or produces incorrect results, reading the raw XML feed to understand what the source system is actually sending—rather than what it's supposed to send—requires formatted XML. The formatter turns an unreadable export into a structure where missing fields, unexpected values, and encoding issues become immediately apparent.

XML Well-Formedness: What the Formatter Checks

Before formatting your XML, the tool parses it and verifies that it's well-formed according to the XML specification. Well-formed XML must meet several requirements: every opening tag must have a corresponding closing tag (or be a self-closing tag like `
`); tags must be properly nested without overlapping (`` is invalid); attribute values must be enclosed in quotes (single or double); certain characters (`<`, `>`, `&`) must be escaped as character references (`<`, `>`, `&`) when used in text content and attribute values; and the document must have exactly one root element at the top level.

Well-formedness is the minimum requirement for any XML parser to process a document. Document validity—conformance to a specific XML schema (DTD or XSD)—is a higher-level constraint that our formatter doesn't check. Valid XML is always well-formed; well-formed XML is not necessarily valid against any particular schema.

XML Namespaces and Formatting

XML namespaces (`xmlns:prefix="namespace-uri"`) allow multiple XML vocabularies to coexist in a single document without element name conflicts. SOAP envelopes, for example, use namespace prefixes like `soap:`, `xsi:`, and `wsdl:` to disambiguate elements from different schemas. Our formatter preserves namespace declarations and prefix associations exactly as they appear in the original document—formatting never modifies namespace definitions or reassigns prefixes, ensuring the formatted output remains semantically equivalent to the original.

Private, Free, and Browser-Based

The XML formatter runs entirely in your browser. No XML data you paste in is transmitted to any server or stored anywhere. It's completely free with no registration required, works on any device with a modern browser, and handles documents of any complexity within your browser's memory. Use it for API responses, configuration files, data feeds, SOAP payloads, or any other XML document that needs to be made readable.