How to pretty print XML from Java?

Question

I have a Java String that contains XML, with no line feeds or indentations. I would like to turn it into a String with nicely formatted XML. How do I do this?

Answer 1

As an alternative to the answers from max, codeskraps, David Easley and milosmns, have a look at my lightweight, high-performance pretty-printer library: xml-formatter

// construct lightweight, threadsafe, instance
PrettyPrinter prettyPrinter = PrettyPrinterBuilder.newPrettyPrinter().build();

StringBuilder buffer = new StringBuilder();
String xml = ..; // also works with char[] or Reader

if(prettyPrinter.process(xml, buffer)) {
     // valid XML, print buffer
} else {
     // invalid XML, print xml
}

Sometimes, like when running mocked SOAP services directly from file, it is good to have a pretty-printer which also handles already pretty-printed XML:

PrettyPrinter prettyPrinter = PrettyPrinterBuilder.newPrettyPrinter().ignoreWhitespace().build();

As some have commented, pretty-printing is just a way of presenting XML in a more human-readable form - whitespace strictly does not belong in your XML data.

The library is intended for pretty-printing for logging purposes, and also includes functions for filtering (subtree removal / anonymization) and pretty-printing of XML in CDATA and Text nodes.