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How can I pretty print XML content from the command line?

stackoverflow.com › questions › 16090869 › how-can-i-pretty-print-xml-content-from-the-command-line

xmllint from libxml2

xmllint --format file.xml

(On Debian-based distributions, install the libxml2-utils package.)

xml_pp from the XML::Twig perl module

xml_pp < file.xml

(On Debian-based distributions, install the xml-twig-tools package.)

XMLStarlet

xmlstarlet format --indent-tab file.xml

Tidy

tidy -xml -i -q file.xml

Python's xml.dom.minidom

echo '<root><foo a="b">lorem</foo><bar value="ipsum" /></root>' |
  python -c 'import sys, xml.dom.minidom; print(xml.dom.minidom.parseString(sys.stdin.read()).toprettyxml())'

saxon-lint (my own project)

saxon-lint --indent --xpath '/' file.xml

saxon-HE

echo '<root><foo a="b">lorem</foo><bar value="ipsum" /></root>' |
  java -cp /usr/share/java/saxon/saxon9he.jar net.sf.saxon.Query \
       -s:- -qs:/ '!indent=yes'

xidel

xidel --output-node-format=xml --output-node-indent -se . -s file.xml

(Credit to Reino)

Output for all commands:

<root>
  <foo a="b">lorem</foo>
  <bar value="ipsum"/>
</root>

Answer from Gilles Quénot on Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow

stackoverflow.com › questions › 16090869 › how-can-i-pretty-print-xml-content-from-the-command-line

unix - How can I pretty print XML content from the command line? - Stack Overflow

Top answer

1 of 13

1240

xmllint from libxml2

xmllint --format file.xml

(On Debian-based distributions, install the libxml2-utils package.)

xml_pp from the XML::Twig perl module

xml_pp < file.xml

(On Debian-based distributions, install the xml-twig-tools package.)

XMLStarlet

xmlstarlet format --indent-tab file.xml

Tidy

tidy -xml -i -q file.xml

Python's xml.dom.minidom

echo '<root><foo a="b">lorem</foo><bar value="ipsum" /></root>' |
  python -c 'import sys, xml.dom.minidom; print(xml.dom.minidom.parseString(sys.stdin.read()).toprettyxml())'

saxon-lint (my own project)

saxon-lint --indent --xpath '/' file.xml

saxon-HE

echo '<root><foo a="b">lorem</foo><bar value="ipsum" /></root>' |
  java -cp /usr/share/java/saxon/saxon9he.jar net.sf.saxon.Query \
       -s:- -qs:/ '!indent=yes'

xidel

xidel --output-node-format=xml --output-node-indent -se . -s file.xml

(Credit to Reino)

Output for all commands:

<root>
  <foo a="b">lorem</foo>
  <bar value="ipsum"/>
</root>

2 of 13

195

xmllint --format yourxmlfile.xml

xmllint is a command line XML tool and is included in libxml2 (http://xmlsoft.org/).

================================================

Note: If you don't have libxml2 installed you can install it by doing the following:

CentOS

cd /tmp
wget ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml2/libxml2-2.8.0.tar.gz
tar xzf libxml2-2.8.0.tar.gz
cd libxml2-2.8.0/
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd

Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install libxml2-utils

Cygwin

apt-cyg install libxml2

macOS

To install this on macOS with Homebrew just do: brew install libxml2

Git

Also available on Git if you want the code: git clone git://git.gnome.org/libxml2

Baeldung

baeldung.com › home › files › file viewing › how to pretty-print xml from the command line

How to Pretty-Print XML From the Command Line | Baeldung on Linux

March 18, 2024 - Learn several ways to pretty-print an XML file using Linux commands

Discussions

formatting - How to prettify/format an XML buffer? - Emacs Stack Exchange

For example, here is a command that will pretty-print the region, optionally with auto-fill enabled: (defun xml-pretty-print (beg end &optional arg) "Reformat the region between BEG and END. More on emacs.stackexchange.com

emacs.stackexchange.com

July 23, 2015

How to format XML document in Linux - Stack Overflow

I have following XML tags in a large number. sh_SEET15002GetReKeyDetails 642 I want to get this formatted in the More on stackoverflow.com

stackoverflow.com

an XML without LF want to make it pretty using sed command in shell - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

I have a structure of a project in my git repository and would like to run a shell command in git bash to replace all the > with >\n (LF). I tried the following command: find . -name '*.xml'... More on unix.stackexchange.com

unix.stackexchange.com

Pretty printing XML?

Hi, I have a buffer in form of a Vec containing XML. What is the easiest/best way to have it be pretty printed on stdout (or to a String)? I've had a look at xml-rs but I can't get my head around it...cry... Cheers, Toby More on users.rust-lang.org

users.rust-lang.org

June 1, 2022

Geekality

geekality.net › blog › pretty-print-xml-on-unix-command-line

Pretty print XML on Unix command line | Geekality

$ curl --digest --user usr:pwd -X PROPFIND | xmllint --format -

Linux Handbook

linuxhandbook.com › pretty-print-xml

Pretty Print XML in Linux Command Line

October 16, 2022 - And to accomplish these results, I've compiled this guide involving three methods of formatting the XML and making it human readable.

SAMLTool

samltool.com › prettyprint.php

XML Pretty Print Online Tool | SAMLTool.com

Easy online tool to pretty print a XML.

GeeksforGeeks

geeksforgeeks.org › web tech › how-to-pretty-print-xml-from-the-command-line

How to Pretty Print XML from the Command Line? - GeeksforGeeks

July 23, 2025 - Below are the approaches to pretty print XML from the command line: ... The xmllint utility, part of the xmllib2 package, is commonly pre-installed on Linux distributions. If you need a simple and widely available solution, go with xmllint. It offers the --format option to reformat and reindent XML files.

Linux Man Pages

linux.die.net › man › 1 › xml_pp

xml_pp(1): xml pretty-printer - Linux man page

xml_pp foo.xml > foo_pp.xml # pretty print foo.xml xml_pp < foo.xml > foo_pp.xml # pretty print from standard input xml_pp -v -i.bak *.xml # pretty print .xml files, with backups xml_pp -v -i'orig_*' *.xml # backups are named orig_<filename> xml_pp -i -p pre foo.xhtml # preserve spaces in pre tags xml_pp -i.bak -p 'pre code' foo.xml # preserve spaces in pre and code tags xml_pp -i.bak -p pre -p code foo.xml # same xml_pp -i -s record mydb_export.xml # pretty print using the record style xml_pp -e utf8 -i foo.xml # output will be in utf8 xml_pp -e iso-8859-1 -i foo.xml # output will be in iso-8859-1 xml_pp -v -i.bak -f lof # pretty print in place files from lof xml_pp -- -i.xml # pretty print the -i.xml file xml_pp -l foo.xml # loads the entire file in memory # before pretty printing it xml_pp -h # display help

Alexwlchan

alexwlchan.net › 2015 › pretty-print

Pretty printing JSON and XML in the shell – alexwlchan

$ curl "http://xkcd.com/rss.xml" <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <rss version="2.0"><channel><title>xkcd.com</title><link>http://xkcd.com/</link><description>xkcd.com: A webcomic of romance and math humor.</link></description><language>en</language><item><title>Red Car</title> ... $ curl "http://xkcd.com/rss.xml" | xmllint --format - <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <rss version="2.0"> <channel> <title>xkcd.com</title> <link>http://xkcd.com/</link> <description>xkcd.com: A webcomic of romance and math humor.</description> <language>en</language> <item> <title>Red Car</title> ...

Find elsewhere

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JSON Formatter

jsonformatter.org › xml-pretty-print

Best XML Pretty Print Online

Best and Secure XML Pretty Print works well in Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge.

TutorialsPoint

tutorialspoint.com › how-to-pretty-print-xml-from-command-line

How to Pretty-Print XML From Command Line?

March 23, 2023 - xmlstarlet is a command-line tool for processing XML data. It can be used to pretty-print XML as well as perform other tasks such as selecting nodes, updating values, and transforming XML data. xmlstarlet is available on most Linux and Unix ...

Linux Hint

linuxhint.com › xml-pretty-print-linux-bash-and-python

XML Pretty Print in Linux Bash and Python – Linux Hint

How to pretty print the XML files in Linux Bash or Python by incorporating it in your code, reading it as external file, or using different command line tools.

Stack Exchange

emacs.stackexchange.com › questions › 14197 › how-to-prettify-format-an-xml-buffer

formatting - How to prettify/format an XML buffer? - Emacs Stack Exchange

Top answer

1 of 6

Does the functionality already exist to reformat this buffer to be somewhat user-readable?

Of course, and you have plenty of options. I'd probably feed it to an external program using:

C-x h C-u M-| xmllint --format - RET

This program comes with libxml2. You could also use tidy. Here's a list of commandline xml formatting tools: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16090869/how-to-pretty-print-xml-from-the-command-line

You could also do a search and replace and then indent:

M-% > < RET > C-q C-j < RET ! C-M-\

Neat trick: you can copy and paste the above string into M-: (eval-expression) like this:

(execute-kbd-macro (kbd "M-% > < RET > C-q C-j < RET ! C-M-\\"))

2 of 6

The built-in sgml-mode has a command to do this: sgml-pretty-print. If you're in nxml-mode it looks like you need switch to sgml-mode first. You could write a command to temporarily switch to sgml-mode, run pretty-print, then switch back to nxml-mode.

For example, here is a command that will pretty-print the region, optionally with auto-fill enabled:

(defun xml-pretty-print (beg end &optional arg)
  "Reformat the region between BEG and END.
    With optional ARG, also auto-fill."
  (interactive "*r\nP")
  (let ((fill (or (bound-and-true-p auto-fill-function) -1)))
    (sgml-mode)
    (when arg (auto-fill-mode))
    (sgml-pretty-print beg end)
    (nxml-mode)
    (auto-fill-mode fill)))

Zgadzaj

zgadzaj.com › development › linux › formatting-xml-from-command-line

Formatting XML from command line | Change(b)log

It doesn't make any real difference to XML reading libraries, but trying to read such XML yourself becomes huge pain. As it turns out, solution to this is pretty simple - xmllint command line tool.

Stack Overflow

stackoverflow.com › questions › 21275928 › how-to-format-xml-document-in-linux

How to format XML document in Linux - Stack Overflow

Top answer

1 of 4

xmllint -format -recover nonformatted.xml > formated.xml

For tab indentation:

export XMLLINT_INDENT=`echo -e '\t'`

For four space indentation:

export XMLLINT_INDENT=\ \ \ \

2 of 4

Without programming you can use Eclipse XML Source Editor. Have a look at this answer

By the way have you tried xmllint -format -recover nonformatted.xml > formated.xml?

EDIT:

You can try this XMLStarlet Command Line XML Toolkit.

5. Formatting XML documents
====================================================

xml fo --help
XMLStarlet Toolkit: Format XML document
Usage: xml fo [<options>] <xml-file>
where <options> are
   -n or --noindent            - do not indent
   -t or --indent-tab          - indent output with tabulation
   -s or --indent-spaces <num> - indent output with <num> spaces
   -o or --omit-decl           - omit xml declaration <?xml version="1.0"?>
   -R or --recover             - try to recover what is parsable
   -D or --dropdtd             - remove the DOCTYPE of the input docs
   -C or --nocdata             - replace cdata section with text nodes
   -N or --nsclean             - remove redundant namespace declarations
   -e or --encode <encoding>   - output in the given encoding (utf-8, unicode...)
   -H or --html                - input is HTML
   -h or --help                - print help

Stack Exchange

unix.stackexchange.com › questions › 561194 › an-xml-without-lf-want-to-make-it-pretty-using-sed-command-in-shell

an XML without LF want to make it pretty using sed command in shell - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

Top answer

1 of 1

It's a bad idea to use sed for this, what you seems to do is to format the XML file.

It's a simple task for any XML parser, ex :

xmllint --format file.xml

This utility is often installed by default on GNU Linux, or with the package libxml2

xmlstarlet format file.xml

JSON Formatter

jsonformatter.org › xml-formatter

Best XML Formatter and XML Beautifier

Best and Secure XML Formatter works well in Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. Format XML File upload files and beautifies. Here are the steps: Step 1: Click on Load Data button. It will open model window / dialog.

Rust Programming Language

users.rust-lang.org › help

Pretty printing XML? - help - The Rust Programming Language Forum

Top answer

1 of 1

I've modified the function so you can use it like this : if let Err(error) = to_writer_pretty(&mut writer, &buffer) { ... } Which, I feel, works better in the context you provided. It's this : pub fn to_writer_pretty(writer: &mut W, buf: &[u8]) -> std::io::Result where W: std::io::…

LibreByte

librebyte.net › en › multimedia-en › how-to-pretty-print-xml-on-gnulinux

How to pretty print XML on GNU/Linux | LibreByte

April 22, 2016 - Tool 2: use xml_pp, xml_pp is part of the XML-Twig suite, to install it on Debian GNU/Linux type: ... If you want to edit the formatted file, you can use any text editor. Tool 3: Use Geany editor and prettyprinter plugin, to install it on Debian GNU/Linux type:

Superhero

superhero.ninja › 2013 › 04 › 24 › pretty-print-xml-on-linux-command-line-bash

Pretty print XML on Linux Command Line BASH – Superhero Ninja

April 24, 2013 - It’s quite handy to indent XML when you need to read it with the human eye, but on a terminal it’s often not as easily readible. Fortunatly there’s a command which’ll indent it so you can actually read it; xmllint –format file.xml This will show you how ugly it could be: Screenshot ...

Code Beautify

codebeautify.org › xml-pretty-print

XML Pretty Print

Pretty Print XML works well on Windows, MAC, Linux, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari.