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Formatting XML for easier reading with Tidy

Posted At : January 27, 2009 8:49 PM 1 Comments

I've been working on performance tuning a clients application which makes heavy use of XML and in order to get my head around the structure of the XML I wanted to have a browse through the XML data.

So I did a Charles capture of the data to have a look. Unfortunately the data was formatted in a single line with no line breaks and as it was just under 1MB it upset all my usual editors (Eclipse & Gedit) and made them become completely unresponsive.

After a bit of hunting I finally found the right tool for the job - HTML Tidy.

With the following command I was able to get the XML formatted nicely which made my editors play nice and made it a lot easier to get an understanding of the data in the XML packet.

tidy -xml -i input.xml > formatted.xml

This takes the input.xml and indents it nicely and saves it as formatted.xml.

Cheers, Mark

Posted in: Linux, Open Source

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1 Comments

Mike Henke 7/13/09 1:26 AM

Have you tried to use HTML Tidy for format CFML code?