Free XML Formatter & Validator

The XML Formatter is a free online tool that formats, beautifies, and minifies XML documents with proper indentation and syntax validation.

Yes, it is completely free with no registration required. All formatting happens client-side in your browser.

Yes, the XML Formatter supports both beautifying (expanding) and minifying (compressing) XML documents.

Absolutely. The XML Formatter & Validator processes everything client-side in your browser. No data is uploaded to or stored on any server. Your content remains private on your device at all times.

Yes, the XML Formatter & Validator is fully responsive and works on smartphones and tablets. You can use it on any device with a modern web browser -- no app download required.

No account or registration is needed. Simply open the XML Formatter & Validator in your browser and start using it immediately. There are no sign-up walls or usage restrictions.

Simply enter your input in the provided field, adjust any settings to your preference, and the tool will process it instantly. You can then copy the result to your clipboard or download it.

The XML Formatter & Validator works in all modern browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Opera. For the best experience, use the latest version of your preferred browser.

Well-formedness is about syntax: every tag is properly opened and closed, attribute values are quoted, special characters like & and < are escaped, and there is exactly one root element. Validity is a stricter, separate idea — it means the document also matches a specific schema contract such as a DTD or XSD, which defines which elements are allowed, their order, and their data types. A document can be perfectly well-formed yet invalid against a schema, and vice versa is impossible. This tool checks well-formedness using your browser's built-in XML parser and surfaces the exact parser error when something breaks, but it does not validate against a DTD or XSD. Paste your XML to instantly confirm the syntax is correct before you worry about schema conformance.

In XML, the ampersand starts an entity reference, so a bare & in your text or attribute values is treated as the beginning of something like &amp; or &#169;. If the parser does not find a valid entity name followed by a semicolon, the document is no longer well-formed and parsing fails. To use a literal ampersand you must write &amp;, just as < becomes &lt; and > becomes &gt;. The same applies to stray characters from copied content, smart quotes, or control characters. This formatter runs your input through the browser's XML parser and reports the parser's own message and approximate location, so you can jump straight to the offending line instead of hunting. Paste your markup and the validator will flag unescaped characters the moment they break the structure.

Switch to the XML-to-JSON option and the tool maps your document onto an equivalent JSON object: each element becomes a key, nested elements become nested objects, and repeated siblings become arrays. Attributes are the tricky part, because JSON has no native concept of them — so they are stored as keys prefixed with @. For example, <book id="123"><title>Hello</title></book> becomes { "book": { "@id": "123", "title": "Hello" } }, which keeps the id distinct from child elements. This convention is widely used and round-trips cleanly when you need to move data into a JSON-based stack or API. Keep in mind that comments and processing instructions are not part of the data model, so they are dropped in the conversion. Paste your XML, choose the JSON output, and copy the result in one step.

XPath is a query language for navigating an XML tree, letting you select nodes by path, name, position, or attribute rather than reading the whole document. The XPath panel here runs your expression against the parsed XML and lists every matching node, so you can test a selector before wiring it into code. Common patterns include //book to grab all book elements anywhere, //book[@category='cooking'] to filter by an attribute value, /catalog/book[price>30]/title to combine a path with a numeric condition, and count(//item) to return a total instead of nodes. Because the query runs against your real document, you immediately see whether a selector matches what you expected or returns nothing. Paste your XML, open the XPath panel, and experiment with expressions to build the exact selector your parser or scraper needs.

An empty element carries no child content, and XML lets you write it two equivalent ways. The self-closing form, <tag/>, packs the open and close into a single token, while the expanded form, <tag></tag>, spells out a matching pair. Both are well-formed and parse to exactly the same node, so the choice is purely stylistic and about consumer compatibility — some older or hand-rolled parsers prefer one form, and certain house styles standardize on the other for readability. This formatter lets you pick how empty elements are written when you beautify, so the whole document comes out consistent instead of mixing both. You can also control indentation, attribute sorting, and whether comments are kept. Paste your XML, choose your empty-element style, and reformat the entire document to match in one click.