Format XML with TextWrangler

Posted on February 15, 2010 by Eoin

My text editor of choice on the Mac is TextWrangler. It’s lightweight and it has pretty much all you need from a text editor. In particular, I like that I can SFTP into my development server.

One issue that bugged me lately was when I opened an unindented, unformatted XML file. Basically, it looked a mess and there was no way to tidy the file up so that I could read it easily.

However, I found a simple way to do this today… thanks to this and this.

Simple guide
We want to add a UNIX script to TextWrangler so it can format an XML file… to do this, do this…

Open TextWrangler and open a new text file.
Copy and paste the code below into this file.

#!/bin/sh
xmllint --c14n "$*" | XMLLINT_INDENT=$'\t' xmllint --encode UTF-8 --format -

Save the file, something like Tidy XML.sh, in the Filters folder.
You can find the filters folder by going to the #! menu and go to the Unix Filters sub-menu, and select the Open Filters Folder, like below.
- Now anytime you want to format an XML file, just go to this menu and select the Tidy XML.sh script and BOOM, neat tidy XML.

This is an interesting facility to extend an already great text editor, and I will be looking into more cool scripts that can hopefully lessen my daily annoyances.

UPDATED:: Added UTF8 encoding, thanks Rolan.
UPDATED:: Added a post to format PHP code in TextWrangler.

50 thoughts on “Format XML with TextWrangler”

JonasT on May 4, 2010 at 09:06 said:

Thank you, thank you, thank you! You’ve saved my date

Reply ↓
- JonasT on May 4, 2010 at 09:07 said:
  
  And now s/date/day
  
  Reply ↓
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Dave on June 28, 2010 at 20:58 said:

Awesome! Thanks for putting this together!

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Jim on July 27, 2010 at 02:45 said:

OMG you just saved me so much time, you have no idea. Thank you!!

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Stuart Peters on November 4, 2010 at 15:36 said:

Brilliant! Not sure why this isn’t standard functionality in text editors these days but many thanks for showing us how easy it is to add!

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Rolan on January 5, 2011 at 14:38 said:

Thanks!
Small addition that was useful for me:
If you are working with UTF-8 encoded files – then the following parameter is required:
--encode UTF-8

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Lassi on March 23, 2011 at 12:16 said:

Thanks a lot! Works beautifully.

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kreeble on April 3, 2011 at 02:12 said:

Thanks this was really useful!

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alist on April 15, 2011 at 03:43 said:

great tips.. I have been trying to find how to implement this in TextWrangler from many sites, but yours is the easiest to understand ..

cheers!

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Cire on April 27, 2011 at 13:53 said:

Muchos gracias!

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Renato on May 26, 2011 at 08:41 said:

Very nice. Simple and efficient. Thanks to publishing it.

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B1 on June 20, 2011 at 05:22 said:

Awesome time saver!

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Piotr on June 21, 2011 at 13:48 said:

Hi,
Great script. I have had only one problem. It’s not formating properly empty tags like that:

So for a file it looks like that:

6982760

graphic
89.000000

A20110609T092928_M_192_168_112_212_01.eps

Any chance to fix it?
Piotr

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Piotr on June 21, 2011 at 13:49 said:

Hmm.. all xml code was just exchanged for something else. Any way to post xml inside comment?
Piotr

Reply ↓
- Eoin on August 10, 2011 at 15:31 said:
  
  Hi Piotr, you could try posting the xml in the comment within the sourcecode shortcode
  
  Reply ↓
hajneosource on July 4, 2011 at 05:04 said:

Thank You

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Secret Chimp on July 15, 2011 at 01:35 said:

Perfect, thank you.

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Eugene Mirotin on July 27, 2011 at 22:57 said:

Thanks, cool tip

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Michael Worthington on August 10, 2011 at 14:42 said:

Is there a way to have the script not truncate empty tags? I need the XML output to format empty tags with both the open and closing tags like so:

instead of

Please advise.

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- Michael Worthington on August 10, 2011 at 14:43 said:
  
  Looks like it didn’t post my XML examples. Here they are:
  
  Desired:
  
  “”
  
  Currently, the script truncates to this:
  
  “”
  
  Reply ↓
  - Eoin on August 10, 2011 at 15:29 said:
    
    Hi Michael, you could try posting the xml in the comment within the sourcecode shortcode
Chris on September 27, 2011 at 22:32 said:

Thank you Thank you Thank you.

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Leo on October 28, 2011 at 14:12 said:
Great solution!

However, there’s a big caveat: Tidy also deletes CDATA tags! If you need your XML to maintain the original text as it was, you may run into trouble.

Tidy does “the right thing” by replacing sensitive characters with their entities, e.g.:
```
<value>[CDATA[Your measurement of n was correct if n<2.5]]></value>
```
is transformed to
```
<value>Your measurement of n was correct if n&lt;2.5</value>
```
This is OK for information in an HTML context, but not if you need the content for other output channels like print!
Reply ↓
- thomaslund on January 30, 2012 at 14:02 said:
  I removed the –c14n option and it left my CDATA intact.
```
xmllint "$*" | XMLLINT_INDENT=$'\t' xmllint --encode UTF-8 --format -
```
  Reply ↓
lutomas on October 30, 2011 at 10:40 said:

Thanks!!!

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John Reeder on November 15, 2011 at 20:02 said:

Dude, where can I send $1,000,000.00? Seriously, Text Wrangler is my text editor of choice but it’s lack of pretty printing functionality for xml was a pain. I have been looking for a good xml editor to accomplish just what this simple script does. Thanks a bunch!

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Mike on January 20, 2012 at 03:38 said:

Very helpful. Thank you very much for taking the time to write this up.

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Jelle on February 10, 2012 at 17:35 said:

Thanks a lot, really useful!

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bberenberg on March 21, 2012 at 18:01 said:

I am trying to use this, but whenever I do, I get the following error:

/private/var/folders/-u/-uE-jkIdFUCr9aKmAFj+t++++TI/-Tmp-/Cleanup At Startup/Tidy XML.sh.S:16: parser error : Extra content at the end of the document

^
-:1: parser error : Document is empty
^
-:1: parser error : Start tag expected, ‘<' not found
^

But the document is 1. Not empty and 2. starts with a < character. I have tried using the Zap Gremlins functionality prior to using this script but this did not help. Any suggestions?

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- garlandkr on April 5, 2012 at 19:29 said:
  
  ya, it’s broken. here is the fix:
  
  xmllint “$*” | XMLLINT_INDENT=$’\t’ xmllint –encode UTF-8 –format -
  
  Reply ↓
  - Bread on April 13, 2012 at 19:35 said:
    
    I am still getting the Document is empty error.
Himalay on April 6, 2012 at 19:42 said:

is there is script that can format xml ignoring if its a valid namespace or the name space prefix is not defined… example

410709522012-03-26Z
201203262232561319

Thank you.

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Sakahayang Dot Com on April 12, 2012 at 14:17 said:

Thankyou for your share

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Jason Boehle on April 13, 2012 at 19:25 said:

Trying to figure out how to do this with Text Wrangler 4.0′s new Text Filters but not having much luck. Anyone else?

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Eerko Vissering (@eerko) on April 18, 2012 at 16:38 said:

Anybody got this working with TextWrangler 4? It doesn’t seem to work anymore…

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Sascha Appel on April 19, 2012 at 14:25 said:

TextWrangler 4 reads from stdin (s. documentation). so the working version for TextWrangler 4 is:

#!/bin/sh
xmllint –c14n /dev/stdin | XMLLINT_INDENT=$’\t’ xmllint –encode UTF-8 –format -

have fun…

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- Eerko Vissering (@eerko) on April 25, 2012 at 10:45 said:
  
  Perfect!
  
  Thanks
  
  Reply ↓
MaryK on May 1, 2012 at 15:52 said:

I’ve changed my script to Sascha Appel’s fix for TW 4.0 but I get this error:

warning: failed to load external entity “–c14n”
/dev/stdin:1: parser error : Document is empty

^
/dev/stdin:1: parser error : Start tag expected, ‘<' not found

^
warning: failed to load external entity "–encode"
warning: failed to load external entity "UTF-8"
warning: failed to load external entity "–format"
-:1: parser error : Document is empty

^
-:1: parser error : Start tag expected, '<' not found

^

I'm on 10.6.8 is that an issue?

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- Robert Herold on May 4, 2012 at 14:59 said:
  
  Watch for evil hyphen conversion – copy/pasting the text seems to convert the hyphens into long hyphens
  
  Reply ↓
- captrespect on May 4, 2012 at 17:32 said:
  
  it’s still double dashes for the options, just replace the “$*” with /dev/stdin
  
  Reply ↓
  - epharion on May 7, 2012 at 13:39 said:
    
    I tried this :
    
    #!/bin/sh
    xmllint –c14n /dev/stdin | XMLLINT_INDENT=$’\t’ xmllint –encode UTF-8 –format -
    
    And it doesn’t work at all (version 4.0 (3142))
  - epharion on May 7, 2012 at 13:40 said:
    
    I tried this :
    
    #!/bin/sh
    xmllint –c14n /dev/stdin | XMLLINT_INDENT=$’\t’ xmllint –encode UTF-8 –format -
    
    And it doesn’t work at all. (version 4.0 (3142))
    
    Any idea ?
  - epharion on May 7, 2012 at 15:13 said:
    
    I found a solution :
    
    #!/bin/sh
    xmllint –c14n – | XMLLINT_INDENT=$’\t’ xmllint –encode UTF-8 –format -
- MaryK on May 8, 2012 at 10:16 said:
  
  Thanks for the replies
  
  I was copying and pasting and so I was falling foul of the automatic formatting issue on this blog’s comments.
  
  I’ve tried various permutations and I still can’t get it to work
  
  This time I’m getting this error: (application error code: 32)
  
  Here are the various permutations I used and here are pastebin.com versions with the exact text formatting http://pastebin.com/DJkc7kPW
  
  [1]
  #!/bin/sh
  xmllint –c14n — | XMLLINT_INDENT=$’\t’ xmllint –encode UTF-8 –format -
  
  [2]
  #!/bin/sh
  xmllint –c14n “/dev/stdin” | XMLLINT_INDENT=$’\t’ xmllint –encode UTF-8 –format -
  
  [3]
  #!/bin/sh
  xmllint –c14n – | XMLLINT_INDENT=$’\t’ xmllint –encode UTF-8 –format -
  
  [4]
  #!/bin/sh
  xmllint –c14n /dev/stdin | XMLLINT_INDENT=/dev/stdin’\t’ xmllint –encode UTF-8 –format -
  
  [5]
  #!/bin/sh
  xmllint –c14n – | XMLLINT_INDENT=$’\t’ xmllint –encode UTF-8 –format -
  
  Reply ↓
  - MaryK on May 8, 2012 at 11:00 said:
    Just to clarify, I also re-did Sascha Appel’s fix for TW4.0 with the correct [I think!] double dash formatting but I get the error 32 for that too:
    
     [6] #!/bin/sh xmllint --c14n /dev/stdin | XMLLINT_INDENT=$’\t’ xmllint --encode UTF-8 --format - 
    
    I’m trying out Eoin’s source code short cut for posting code on this blog to fix the formatting issue. If the code above is a mess or missing its also on pastebin http://pastebin.com/Yj1zE7Lq
MaryK on May 8, 2012 at 11:05 said:
The source code short cut worked!!
For any one else who’s interested I wrapped the code in the following -except use square brackets instead of
```
 
<sourcecode language="text">
code goes here
 </sourcecode>
 
```
Reply ↓
- MaryK on May 8, 2012 at 11:07 said:
  
  Man, the automatic formatting really messes things up! That post was supposed to read “except use square brackets instead of greater than or less than signs”
  
  Reply ↓

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