Transformer transformer = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
transformer.setOutputProperty("{http://xml.apache.org/xslt}indent-amount", "2");
// initialize StreamResult with File object to save to file
StreamResult result = new StreamResult(new StringWriter());
DOMSource source = new DOMSource(doc);
transformer.transform(source, result);
String xmlString = result.getWriter().toString();
System.out.println(xmlString);
Note: Results may vary depending on the Java version. Search for workarounds specific to your platform.
Answer from Lorenzo Boccaccia on Stack OverflowTransformer transformer = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
transformer.setOutputProperty("{http://xml.apache.org/xslt}indent-amount", "2");
// initialize StreamResult with File object to save to file
StreamResult result = new StreamResult(new StringWriter());
DOMSource source = new DOMSource(doc);
transformer.transform(source, result);
String xmlString = result.getWriter().toString();
System.out.println(xmlString);
Note: Results may vary depending on the Java version. Search for workarounds specific to your platform.
a simpler solution based on this answer:
public static String prettyFormat(String input, int indent) {
try {
Source xmlInput = new StreamSource(new StringReader(input));
StringWriter stringWriter = new StringWriter();
StreamResult xmlOutput = new StreamResult(stringWriter);
TransformerFactory transformerFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
transformerFactory.setAttribute("indent-number", indent);
transformerFactory.setAttribute(XMLConstants.ACCESS_EXTERNAL_DTD, "");
transformerFactory.setAttribute(XMLConstants.ACCESS_EXTERNAL_STYLESHEET, "");
Transformer transformer = transformerFactory.newTransformer();
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
transformer.transform(xmlInput, xmlOutput);
return xmlOutput.getWriter().toString();
} catch (Exception e) {
throw new RuntimeException(e); // simple exception handling, please review it
}
}
public static String prettyFormat(String input) {
return prettyFormat(input, 2);
}
testcase:
prettyFormat("<root><child>aaa</child><child/></root>");
returns:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<root>
<child>aaa</child>
<child/>
</root>
//Ignore: Original edit just needs missing s in the Class name in code. redundant six characters added to get over 6 characters validation on SO
Videos
In reply to Espinosa's comment, here is a solution when "the original xml is not already (partially) indented or contain new lines".
Background
Excerpt from the article (see References below) inspiring this solution:
Based on the DOM specification, whitespaces outside the tags are perfectly valid and they are properly preserved. To remove them, we can use XPath’s normalize-space to locate all the whitespace nodes and remove them first.
Java Code
public static String toPrettyString(String xml, int indent) {
try {
// Turn xml string into a document
Document document = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance()
.newDocumentBuilder()
.parse(new InputSource(new ByteArrayInputStream(xml.getBytes("utf-8"))));
// Remove whitespaces outside tags
document.normalize();
XPath xPath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
NodeList nodeList = (NodeList) xPath.evaluate("//text()[normalize-space()='']",
document,
XPathConstants.NODESET);
for (int i = 0; i < nodeList.getLength(); ++i) {
Node node = nodeList.item(i);
node.getParentNode().removeChild(node);
}
// Setup pretty print options
TransformerFactory transformerFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
transformerFactory.setAttribute("indent-number", indent);
Transformer transformer = transformerFactory.newTransformer();
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.ENCODING, "UTF-8");
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.OMIT_XML_DECLARATION, "yes");
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
// Return pretty print xml string
StringWriter stringWriter = new StringWriter();
transformer.transform(new DOMSource(document), new StreamResult(stringWriter));
return stringWriter.toString();
} catch (Exception e) {
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
}
Sample usage
String xml = "<root>" + //
"\n " + //
"\n<name>Coco Puff</name>" + //
"\n <total>10</total> </root>";
System.out.println(toPrettyString(xml, 4));
Output
<root>
<name>Coco Puff</name>
<total>10</total>
</root>
References
- Java: Properly Indenting XML String published on MyShittyCode
- Save new XML node to file
I guess that the problem is related to blank text nodes (i.e. text nodes with only whitespaces) in the original file. You should try to programmatically remove them just after the parsing, using the following code. If you don't remove them, the Transformer is going to preserve them.
original.getDocumentElement().normalize();
XPathExpression xpath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath().compile("//text()[normalize-space(.) = '']");
NodeList blankTextNodes = (NodeList) xpath.evaluate(original, XPathConstants.NODESET);
for (int i = 0; i < blankTextNodes.getLength(); i++) {
blankTextNodes.item(i).getParentNode().removeChild(blankTextNodes.item(i));
}