XML Formatter & Validator

An XML document is well-formed when it follows the core syntax rules: exactly one root element, every opening tag matched by a closing tag (or written self-closing like <stock/>), properly nested elements, quoted attribute values, and the five special characters escaped in text (& < > " '). This tool validates with your browser's native XML parser — the same strict parser used for RSS feeds and SVG — and reports the first error with its approximate line number.

Pretty-printing puts each element on its own line and indents children one level deeper, while elements that contain only text (like <price>44.95</price>) stay on a single line for readability. Comments are kept where they appear, and CDATA sections are preserved byte-for-byte, since their content — often embedded HTML, code, or markup — is intentionally exempt from XML escaping rules.

Minify mode strips the whitespace between elements, which typically shrinks a hand-formatted document by 10–30%. It is the right choice for XML payloads sent over the network, such as SOAP requests, sitemaps, or RSS feeds, where indentation only adds bytes.