XML Prettifier

XML prettifying takes minified or poorly-formatted XML and outputs it with consistent indentation, line breaks, and readable structure. It's the same as 'beautifying' or 'formatting' XML. The resulting XML is semantically identical to the input — only whitespace changes.

The tool parses your XML using the browser's built-in DOMParser, then serializes it back with proper indentation using a recursive tree walker. This approach handles all valid XML including namespaces, CDATA sections, processing instructions, and comments. It runs 100% in your browser with no server calls.

XML is a strict markup language where all tags must be closed, attribute values must be quoted, and tag names are case-sensitive. HTML is more lenient (e.g., self-closing void elements are optional). XML is used for data exchange (RSS, SOAP, SVG, config files) while HTML is the language of web pages.

The tool uses DOMParser which will catch well-formedness errors (unclosed tags, mismatched tags, invalid characters). If your XML has errors, the error will be shown. However, this is not a full schema validator — it checks XML well-formedness, not validity against a DTD or XSD schema.

Element count is the total number of XML elements (tags) in the document. Attribute count is the total number of attributes across all elements. These quick stats help you understand the document structure at a glance.

CDATA (Character Data) sections let you include text that would normally need to be escaped (like < and &) without escaping it. They're delimited by <![CDATA[ and ]]>. Common in RSS feeds and SOAP messages to wrap HTML content or code snippets inside XML.