format xml, pretty print

Question

I know of two ways to "pretty print", or format, xml:

1. shell tools
2. Hack 38 Pretty-Print XML Using a Generic Identity Stylesheet and Xalan

what other free (as in beer) formatters are there? (aside from using javascript)

Answer 1

Well, the identity transform you linked to is portable to any XSLT processor (Saxon, msxml, etc).

Additionally, you could look at xmllint which is part of the LibXML2 toolkit. The --format option allows you to pretty print the input. Similar functionality exists in XMLStarlet (which uses LibXML2 under the hood iirc).

Answer 2

xmlstarlet fo is what I use for pretty printing. Xmlstarlet has a number of options:

$ xmlstarlet fo --help
XMLStarlet Toolkit: Format XML document
Usage: xml fo [<options>] <xml-file>
where <options> are
  -n or --noindent            - do not indent
  -t or --indent-tab          - indent output with tabulation
  -s or --indent-spaces <num> - indent output with <num> spaces
  -o or --omit-decl           - omit xml declaration <?xml version="1.0"?>
  -R or --recover             - try to recover what is parsable
  -D or --dropdtd             - remove the DOCTYPE of the input docs
  -C or --nocdata             - replace cdata section with text nodes
  -N or --nsclean             - remove redundant namespace declarations
  -e or --encode <encoding>   - output in the given encoding (utf-8, unicode...)
  -H or --html                - input is HTML

A good XML engineer should be able to wield xmlstarlet.