How to pretty print XML from the command line

Question

Related  How can I pretty-print JSON in  unix  shell script   Is there a  unix  shell script to format XML in human-readable form   Basically  I want it to transform the following    lt root gt  lt foo a  b  gt lorem lt  foo gt  lt bar value  ipsum    gt  lt  root gt        into something like this    lt root gt       lt foo a  b  gt lorem lt  foo gt       lt bar value  ipsum    gt   lt  root gt

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This simple st  solution doesn t provide indentation  but it is nevertheless much easier on the human eye  Also it allows the xml to be handled more easily by simple tools like grep  head  awk  etc  Use sed to replace   lt   with itself preceeded with a newline  And as mentioned by Gilles  it s probably not a good idea to use this in production    check you are getting more than one line out sed  s  lt   n lt  g  sample xml   wc -l    check the output looks generally ok sed  s  lt   n lt  g  sample xml   head    capture the pretty xml in a different file sed  s  lt   n lt  g  sample xml  gt  prettySample xml

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This took me forever to find something that works on my mac  Here s what worked for me   brew install xmlformat cat unformatted html   xmlformat

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I would  nicholas mordor   flwor   nicholas mordor   flwor  cat ugly xml     lt root gt  lt foo a  quot b quot  gt lorem lt  foo gt  lt bar value  quot ipsum quot    gt  lt  root gt   nicholas mordor   flwor   nicholas mordor   flwor  basex BaseX 9 0 1  Standalone  Try  help  to get more information   gt    gt  create database pretty Database  pretty  created in 231 32 ms   gt    gt  open pretty Database  pretty  was opened in 0 05 ms   gt    gt  set parser xml PARSER  xml  gt    gt  add ugly xml Resource s  added in 161 88 ms   gt    gt  xquery    lt root gt     lt foo a  quot b quot  gt lorem lt  foo gt     lt bar value  quot ipsum quot   gt   lt  root gt  Query executed in 179 04 ms   gt    gt  exit Have fun  nicholas mordor   flwor    if only because then it s  quot in quot  a database  and not  quot just quot  a file   Easier to work with  to my mind  Subscribing to the belief that others have worked this problem out already   If you prefer  no doubt eXist might even be  quot better quot  at formatting xml  or as good  You can always query the data various different ways  of course   I kept it as simple as possible   You can just use a GUI  too  but you specified console

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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

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libxml2-utils  This utility comes with libxml2-utils   echo   lt root gt  lt foo a  b  gt lorem lt  foo gt  lt bar value  ipsum    gt  lt  root gt         xmllint --format -   Perl s XML  Twig  This command comes with XML  Twig perl module  sometimes xml-twig-tools package   echo   lt root gt  lt foo a  b  gt lorem lt  foo gt  lt bar value  ipsum    gt  lt  root gt         xml pp   xmlstarlet  This command comes with xmlstarlet   echo   lt root gt  lt foo a  b  gt lorem lt  foo gt  lt bar value  ipsum    gt  lt  root gt         xmlstarlet format --indent-tab   tidy  Check the tidy package   echo   lt root gt  lt foo a  b  gt lorem lt  foo gt  lt bar value  ipsum    gt  lt  root gt         tidy -xml -i -   Python  Python s xml dom minidom can format XML  both python2 and python3    echo   lt root gt  lt foo a  b  gt lorem lt  foo gt  lt bar value  ipsum    gt  lt  root gt         python -c  import sys import xml dom minidom s sys stdin read   print xml dom minidom parseString s  toprettyxml       saxon-lint  You need saxon-lint   echo   lt root gt  lt foo a  b  gt lorem lt  foo gt  lt bar value  ipsum    gt  lt  root gt         saxon-lint --indent --xpath     -   saxon-HE  You need saxon-HE    echo   lt root gt  lt foo a  b  gt lorem lt  foo gt  lt bar value  ipsum    gt  lt  root gt         java -cp  usr share java saxon saxon9he jar net sf saxon Query       -s - -qs     indent yes

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You can also use tidy  which may need to be installed first  e g  on Ubuntu  sudo apt-get install tidy    For this  you would issue something like following   tidy -xml -i your-file xml  gt  output xml   Note  has many additional readability flags  but word-wrap behavior is a bit annoying to untangle  http   tidy sourceforge net docs quickref html

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Edit   Disclaimer  you should usually prefer installing a mature tool like xmllint to do a job like this  XML HTML can be a horribly mutilated mess  However  there are valid situations where using existing tooling is preferable over manually installing new ones  and where it is also a safe bet the XML s source is valid  enough   I ve written this script for one of those cases  but they are rare  so precede with caution     I d like to add a pure Bash solution  as it is not  that  difficult to just do it by hand  and sometimes you won t want to install an extra tool to do the job      bin bash  declare -i currentIndent 0 declare -i nextIncrement 0 while read -r line   do   currentIndent   nextIncrement   nextIncrement 0   if      line       lt         then   line contains a closer  just decrease the indent     currentIndent  -1   else     dirtyStartTag    line   gt         dirtyTagName    dirtyStartTag           tagName    dirtyTagName   lt           increase indent unless line contains closing tag or closes itself     if        line       lt   tagName gt    amp  amp      line         gt        then       nextIncrement  1     fi   fi      print with indent   printf    s s       currentIndent   2      print spaces for the indent count   echo  line done  lt  lt  lt     cat -   sed  s  gt  lt   gt  n lt  g      separate  gt  lt  with a newline    Paste it in a script file  and pipe in the xml  This assumes the xml is all on one line  and there are no extra spaces anywhere  One could easily add some extra  s  to the regexes to fix that

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Without installing anything on macOS   most Unix   Use tidy  cat filename xml   tidy -xml -iq  Redirecting viewing a file with cat to tidy specifying the file type of xml and to indent while quiet output will suppress error output  JSON also works  with -json

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With xidel  xidel -s input xml -e  serialize     quot indent quot  true       lt root gt     lt foo a  quot b quot  gt lorem lt  foo gt     lt bar value  quot ipsum quot   gt   lt  root gt   Or file write  quot output xml quot      quot indent quot  true     to save to a file

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xmllint support formatting in-place   for f in   xml  do xmllint -o  f --format  f  done   As Daniel Veillard has written      I think   xmllint -o tst xml --format tst xml   should be safe as the parser will fully load the input into a tree   before opening the output to serialize it    Indent level is controlled by XMLLINT INDENT environment variable which is by default 2 spaces  Example how to change indent to 4 spaces   XMLLINT INDENT         xmllint -o out xml --format in xml   You may have lack with --recover option when you XML documents are broken  Or try weak HTML parser with strict XML output   xmllint --html --xmlout  lt in xml  gt out xml   --nsclean  --nonet  --nocdata  --noblanks etc may be useful  Read man page   apt-get install libxml2-utils apt-cyg install libxml2 brew install libxml2

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You didn t mention a file  so I assume you want to provide the XML string as standard input on the command line   In that case  do the following     echo   lt root gt  lt foo a  b  gt lorem lt  foo gt  lt bar value  ipsum    gt  lt  root gt     xmllint --format -

[xml] How to pretty print XML from the command line?

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