XML Viewer, Formatter And Validator

XML turns up long after you stopped expecting it: an RSS feed you are debugging, the sitemap your SEO tool keeps rejecting, an export from an accounting package, a SOAP response, a settings file for a program that will not start. Paste it here and this XML viewer does three things at once. It shows the document as a collapsible tree, with each element's attributes, namespace prefix and child count on the row. It reformats it with proper indentation, which is the part people mean by an XML formatter or an XML beautifier. And it checks that it actually parses, which is usually the real question.

The Error Message You Actually Wanted

Browsers do not throw when XML is broken. They quietly hand back a document containing a parsererror element, worded differently in every engine, and most online viewers just print that raw. This one reads whichever wording it gets, works out the line and the column, prints the offending line with a caret under the character, and adds a plain-English note when the mistake is a familiar one: a tag closed with the wrong name, two root elements, a bare & that should have been &, an HTML entity such as   that XML has never heard of, an attribute without quotes, a duplicated attribute, a CDATA section that never ends. Where the browser says nothing useful, the tool walks the source itself and stops at the first character that cannot be right.

What Minify Does, And Does Not Do

This matters more in XML than in most formats. Whitespace between elements is decoration and can go; whitespace inside a text node is data, and deleting it changes the document. So the Minified tab only removes the indentation between tags, never a space inside a value, and it leaves mixed content - text with elements inside it - exactly as it found it. Comments, CDATA sections and instructions all survive, and the saving is shown in bytes.

Who It Is For, And Its Limits

You do not need to be a developer. If you are trying to see what is inside a file rather than write one, the tree, the namespace summary and the document-kind line - which recognises an RSS or Atom feed, a sitemap, an SVG and a SOAP envelope by their root element - do the reading for you. The limits are honest ones: everything runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored, but the size you can open depends on your device rather than on a quota, and this checks that a document is well formed, not that it matches a DTD or a schema. If your file is JSON rather than XML, the JSON formatter is its twin, and the HTML formatter handles markup that is not well formed at all.

Then Put It On A Link

When you need to show someone the file rather than paste it into a chat window, the publish button puts a colour-coded page of your XML on a free OxyPages subdomain with HTTPS, without an account. That link lasts 30 minutes; claiming it is free, keeps it permanently and lets you choose the address, with custom domains available on paid plans. Instant publishing accepts up to 5 MB. See how it works or compare plans.