How to pretty print XML from the command line?

xmllint

This utility comes with libxml2-utils:

echo '<root><foo a="b">lorem</foo><bar value="ipsum" /></root>' |    xmllint --format -

Perl's XML::Twig

This command comes with XML::Twig perl module, sometimes xml-twig-tools package:

echo '<root><foo a="b">lorem</foo><bar value="ipsum" /></root>' |    xml_pp

xmlstarlet

This command comes with xmlstarlet:

echo '<root><foo a="b">lorem</foo><bar value="ipsum" /></root>' |    xmlstarlet format --indent-tab

tidy

Check the tidy package:

echo '<root><foo a="b">lorem</foo><bar value="ipsum" /></root>' |    tidy -xml -i -

Python

Python's xml.dom.minidom can format XML (works also on legacy python2):

echo '<root><foo a="b">lorem</foo><bar value="ipsum" /></root>' |    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 '<root><foo a="b">lorem</foo><bar value="ipsum" /></root>' |    saxon-lint --indent --xpath '/' -

saxon-HE

You need 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'

xmllint --format yourxmlfile.xml

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

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

CentOS

cd /tmpwget ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml2/libxml2-2.8.0.tar.gztar xzf libxml2-2.8.0.tar.gzcd libxml2-2.8.0/./configuremakesudo make installcd

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

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 > 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).