How can I pretty print XML content from the command line?

Question

Related: How can I pretty-print JSON in a shell script?

Is there a (Unix) shell script to format XML content in human-readable form?

Basically, I want it to transform the following:

<root><foo a="b">lorem</foo><bar value="ipsum" /></root>

... into something like this:

<root>
    <foo a="b">lorem</foo>
    <bar value="ipsum" />
</root>

Answer 1

xmllint from libxml2

xmllint --format file.xml

(On Debian-based distributions, install the libxml2-utils package.)

xml_pp from the XML::Twig perl module

xml_pp < file.xml

(On Debian-based distributions, install the xml-twig-tools package.)

XMLStarlet

xmlstarlet format --indent-tab file.xml

Tidy

tidy -xml -i -q file.xml

Python's xml.dom.minidom

echo '<root><foo a="b">lorem</foo><bar value="ipsum" /></root>' |
  python -c 'import sys, xml.dom.minidom; print(xml.dom.minidom.parseString(sys.stdin.read()).toprettyxml())'

saxon-lint (my own project)

saxon-lint --indent --xpath '/' file.xml

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'

xidel

xidel --output-node-format=xml --output-node-indent -se . -s file.xml

(Credit to Reino)

Output for all commands:

<root>
  <foo a="b">lorem</foo>
  <bar value="ipsum"/>
</root>

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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).

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

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 <in.xml >out.xml

--nsclean, --nonet, --nocdata, --noblanks etc may be useful. Read man page.

apt-get install libxml2-utils
dnf install libxml2
apt-cyg install libxml2
brew install libxml2

Answer 7

yq can be used to pretty print XML. It has an option to define the indent.

yq --input-format xml --output-format xml --indent 2

Answer 8

This simple(st) solution doesn't provide indentation, but it is nevertheless much easier on the human eye. Also it allows the XML content to be handled more easily by simple tools like grep, head, AWK, etc.

Use sed to replace '<' with itself preceded 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/</\n</g' sample.xml | wc -l

# Check the output looks generally OK
sed 's/</\n</g' sample.xml | head

# Capture the pretty XML content in a different file
sed 's/</\n</g' sample.xml > prettySample.xml

Answer 9

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

Answer 10

With an up-to-date binary of the XML/HTML/JSON parser xidel:

$ xidel -s "input.xml" -e . --output-node-format=xml --output-node-indent
$ xidel -s "input.xml" -e 'serialize(.,{"indent":true()})'

$ echo '<root><foo a="b">lorem</foo><bar value="ipsum" /></root>' | \
  xidel -se . --output-node-format=xml --output-node-indent
$ echo '<root><foo a="b">lorem</foo><bar value="ipsum" /></root>' | \
  xidel -se 'serialize(.,{"indent":true()})'

Answer 11

I would:

nicholas@mordor:~/flwor$ 
nicholas@mordor:~/flwor$ cat ugly.xml 


<root><foo a="b">lorem</foo><bar value="ipsum" /></root>

nicholas@mordor:~/flwor$ 
nicholas@mordor:~/flwor$ basex
BaseX 9.0.1 [Standalone]
Try 'help' to get more information.
> 
> create database pretty
Database 'pretty' created in 231.32 ms.
> 
> open pretty
Database 'pretty' was opened in 0.05 ms.
> 
> set parser xml
PARSER: xml
> 
> add ugly.xml
Resource(s) added in 161.88 ms.
> 
> xquery .
<root>
  <foo a="b">lorem</foo>
  <bar value="ipsum"/>
</root>
Query executed in 179.04 ms.
> 
> exit
Have fun.
nicholas@mordor:~/flwor$ 

if only because then it's "in" a database, and not "just" 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 "better" 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.

Answer 12

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" == "</"* ]]; then # line contains a closer, just decrease the indent
    currentIndent+=-1
  else
    dirtyStartTag="${line%%>*}"
    dirtyTagName="${dirtyStartTag%% *}"
    tagName="${dirtyTagName//</}"
    # increase indent unless line contains closing tag or closes itself
    if [[ ! "$line" =~ "</$tagName>" && ! "$line" == *"/>"  ]]; then
      nextIncrement+=1
    fi
  fi

  # print with indent
  printf "%*s%s" $(( $currentIndent * 2 )) # print spaces for the indent count
  echo $line
done <<< "$(cat - | sed 's/></>\n</g')" # separate >< 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.

Answer 13

You can try my CLI tool xmq to pretty print and syntax highlight XML and HTML content. Note that it renders the XML/HTML/JSON content in the XMQ format, which is easier to read and edit. There is, however, a 1-1 mapping between XMQ and XML. The tool is very useful for analyzing large XML and HTML files.

The xmq tool also includes a pager for the terminal: xmq file.xml page

The tool can also render into a temporary html file which is automatically viewed in your default browser: xmq file.xml browse

It picks the color scheme from your terminals background color (light or dark), but you can override it:

XMQ_BG=dark xmq file.xml browse

XMQ_BG=light xmq file.xml browse

It works in a pipeline as well: curl https://slashdot.org | xmq delete //script delete //style page

Apart from deleting XPath matched nodes, there are other commands to convert to and from xmq/XML/HTML/JSON format and apply transformations to the content.