📄 XML Formatter
Format, validate, and minify XML instantly. Paste your XML below to get started.
❓ FAQ
XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a markup language for storing and transporting structured data. Unlike HTML, it uses custom tags defined by the user. It's widely used in RSS feeds, SOAP web services, SVG graphics, and Office document formats.
XML supports attributes, namespaces, and mixed content, making it better for document-centric data. JSON is more concise and integrates naturally with JavaScript, making it preferred for modern APIs. For complex document structures with lots of metadata, XML has advantages.
Well-formed XML follows basic syntax rules: all tags must be closed, attribute values must be quoted, special characters must be escaped, and there must be exactly one root element. This is different from "valid" XML which also conforms to a schema (DTD or XSD).
XML uses five predefined entities: & for &, < for <, > for >, ' for apostrophe, and " for quote. Alternatively, wrap content in a CDATA section: <![CDATA[your content here]]>.
XML namespaces prevent naming conflicts when combining XML documents from different sources. Declared with xmlns:prefix="URI", they allow the same element name to mean different things in different contexts (e.g., <html:div> vs <svg:div>).