Beautify XML Online
Processing entirely on your device — large files may take a moment.
The formatter tokenizes the document instead of re-serializing it through a DOM, so comments, CDATA sections and processing instructions keep their inner text exactly as written — only whitespace between tags is re-arranged.
Short leaf elements (`<name>value</name>`) stay on one line so the output reads like a well-kept config file, not a vertical haystack.
How to beautify XML
- 1
Select your files
Drag & drop your XML files onto the area above, or click to browse. You can add multiple files at once for batch conversion.
- 2
Convert instantly
Click "Convert to XML". The conversion runs entirely inside your browser using WebAssembly — no upload, no queue, no waiting.
- 3
Download results
Download each converted XML file individually, or grab everything at once as a ZIP archive.
About the XML format
XML (W3C, 1998) is the enterprise ancestor of JSON: angle-bracketed elements with attributes, nested into trees, carrying optional namespaces, schemas (XSD) and transformation tooling (XPath, XSLT). Office documents, RSS feeds, SOAP services, Android layouts and thousands of industry interchange standards (HL7, METS, SBML) are built on it.
It remains the right choice where validation and self-description matter more than brevity: schemas catch malformed documents at the door, namespaces let multiple vocabularies coexist in one file. The price is verbosity — XML files run two to four times larger than the same JSON, and hand-reading deeply nested XML is nobody's hobby.
+Strengths
- ✓Schema validation catches bad data at the boundary
- ✓Namespaces and attributes model rich semantics
- ✓Decades of enterprise tooling (XPath, XSLT, SOAP)
!Limitations
- −Verbose — 2–4× larger than equivalent JSON
- −Harder to read by hand
- −Modern web APIs have moved on to JSON
Frequently asked questions
Will formatting change my XML content?
Whitespace-only text nodes are re-indented; everything else — attribute order, comments, CDATA — is untouched.
My XML failed to format — why?
The input must be well-formed XML. Unescaped `&` or `<` inside text is the usual culprit; escape them as & and < first.
How large a file can it handle?
XML up to a few MB processes instantly in the browser; DOM-free tokenizing keeps memory low.