Format, beautify, minify, and validate XML. Syntax highlighted output.
Input XML
The XML Formatter takes raw or minified XML and re-indents it into a clean, human-readable tree with consistent nesting, so you can read config files, SOAP envelopes, RSS/Atom feeds, Android layouts, SVG markup, or Maven pom.xml files at a glance. It runs entirely in your browser, checks that the document is well-formed as you paste, and flags common structural errors like unclosed tags, mismatched element names, and stray characters before the root element.
It is built for backend and mobile developers, integration engineers, and anyone debugging XML-based APIs. Beyond beautifying, the tool minifies XML back down by stripping insignificant whitespace between elements, which is useful for shrinking payloads before sending them over the wire or storing them in a database column.
The formatter parses your input against XML well-formedness rules rather than a specific schema. Well-formedness means there is exactly one root element, every start tag has a matching end tag (or is self-closed like <br/>), tags are properly nested without overlap, attribute values are quoted, and reserved characters are escaped as entities such as & for &, < for <, and > for >. If any of these rules is broken the parser stops and reports the position, which is why the tool can catch errors before you send the payload to a server.
Once parsed, beautifying walks the resulting node tree and re-emits it, adding a newline and one level of your chosen indent for each descent into a child element. Text content, comments (<!-- -->), CDATA sections, and processing instructions like the <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> declaration are preserved rather than reformatted. Minifying performs the reverse: it removes the whitespace that sits purely between elements while leaving whitespace inside text nodes intact, since collapsing that could change the document's meaning.
Note that formatting normalizes only presentation, not semantics. Attribute order is preserved, namespaces (xmlns) are kept as written, and the tool does not validate against a DTD or XSD schema, so it will not tell you whether an element is allowed in a given position, only whether the syntax itself is valid.
Yes, it is completely free with no sign-up. All parsing and formatting happen locally in your browser using JavaScript, so your XML is never uploaded to a server, which makes it safe for config files or API payloads that contain sensitive data.
Beautifying adds line breaks and indentation to reveal the element hierarchy for easier reading and debugging. Minifying strips the insignificant whitespace between tags to produce the smallest valid payload for transmission or storage.
No. It reports where a document is not well-formed, such as an unclosed or mismatched tag, but it does not guess or auto-repair your markup. You need to correct the reported error and re-run the format.
No. This tool only checks well-formedness (correct syntax, nesting, and escaping). It does not verify that your document conforms to a schema, so structural rules like required elements or allowed values are not enforced.
Yes. Any well-formed XML works, including SOAP envelopes, RSS and Atom feeds, SVG images, Android layouts, and Maven pom.xml files, because the formatter treats them all as generic XML rather than a specific vocabulary.
Those are XML entity references. The characters & < > must be escaped inside text and attribute values because they have special meaning in XML, and the tool preserves them so the output stays well-formed.
There is no fixed limit, but since everything runs in your browser, very large documents (tens of megabytes) may be slow depending on your device's memory and CPU.