XML Formatter

Indent and validate XML while preserving document order, attributes and comments.

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Options

Indentation

Self-close empty elements

Writes <tag/> instead of <tag></tag>.

XML input

Formatted XML

Output appears here as you type.

Ctrl + Enter to run

About the XML Formatter

Indenting XML exposes the element hierarchy, which is the whole point of the format and completely invisible in the single-line documents most SOAP endpoints and export tools produce. Attribute-heavy markup in particular becomes readable only once it is broken across lines.

Formatting also surfaces structural errors — an unclosed tag or a mismatched namespace prefix stops the parse and is reported where it happens. If you are comparing two XML documents, format both first, or the diff will be dominated by line-break differences rather than content.

Frequently asked questions

Is document order preserved?

Yes, and that is not a given. Many XML-to-object libraries collapse repeated sibling elements into arrays and lose the original ordering, so rebuilding produces a document that is no longer equivalent. This formatter parses in order-preserving mode specifically so the output is a faithful reformat.

Does it validate my XML?

It checks well-formedness — correct nesting, matching tags, legal attribute syntax — and reports the line and column of the first problem. It does not validate against a DTD or XSD schema, which is a separate task requiring the schema document.

Are comments and CDATA kept?

Comments are preserved and re-indented. CDATA sections are kept intact, since their contents are by definition not to be parsed.