XML Formatter & Beautifier

What is XML formatting?

XML formatting (also called pretty-printing or beautifying) adds consistent indentation and line breaks to XML documents so their element hierarchy is easy to read. Minified or machine-generated XML often arrives as a single dense line, which makes manual inspection, debugging, and code review unnecessarily difficult.

This tool re-formats your XML directly in the browser. Paste your document, choose an indentation style, and copy the result — nothing is uploaded or stored.

Features

• Configurable indentation: 2 spaces, 4 spaces, or tabs
• Preserves comments, CDATA sections, and processing instructions
• Syntax error reporting with line and column numbers
• Handles large documents entirely client-side
• Works offline once the page is loaded — no server round-trips

When to use it

Use the formatter when inspecting SOAP or REST API responses, reviewing configuration files such as pom.xml or web.config, preparing XML for documentation, or diffing two documents where consistent formatting makes changes visible.

Frequently asked questions

• Is formatting the same as validating? No — formatting only changes whitespace. Use the XML Validator tab to check well-formedness, or the XSD Validator to check conformance against a schema.
• Does formatting change my data? No. Pretty-printing only adjusts whitespace between elements; element order, attributes, text content, comments, and CDATA are preserved.
• Is my XML uploaded anywhere? No — the formatter runs 100% in your browser. You can disconnect from the network and it still works.
• What indentation should I use? 2 spaces is the common default for XML; tabs keep diffs smallest in editors configured for them. The tool supports 2 spaces, 4 spaces, and tabs.