XML Formatter

Why XML Pretty-Printing Still Matters

A lot of XML in the wild is minified or accidentally mangled: SOAP responses logged as single-line blobs, XBRL financial filings served without indentation, HL7 CDA documents formatted for machines rather than humans, RSS feeds hand-edited into inconsistency. When you need to debug one of these documents — hunt for a missing element, verify a namespace, check what attributes are actually set — the first thing you do is pretty-print it. This tool takes raw XML, parses it for well-formedness, and re-emits it with configurable indentation (2 spaces, 4 spaces, or tabs), one-attribute-per-line mode for wide headers, and a minify mode for the reverse trip.

Well-Formedness vs. Validity

This formatter checks whether XML is well-formed — tags match, attributes are quoted, special characters are escaped, there is exactly one root element. That is a necessary precondition but not the same as valid, which requires checking the document against a schema (XSD, DTD, Relax NG). For debugging an ad-hoc SOAP response or SAML assertion, well-formedness is usually what you need. For compliance-grade validation against a trading-partner implementation guide, you need a schema-aware processor. The error messages here include line and column numbers to point you at broken markup fast.

Working With XML-Based Systems

SOAP services, XBRL filings, HL7 CDA documents, and XML-based EDI flows are still the backbone of a lot of enterprise integration. Debugging them by hand is fine; building reliable inbound and outbound pipelines around them is a project. I build integrations that handle XML parsing, schema validation, namespace resolution, and XSLT transformations cleanly across legacy and modern systems. Learn about integration services, explore modernization capabilities, or get in touch to discuss your XML workflow.