how to pretty print xml from Java

Question

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

String unformattedXml = "<tag><nested>hello</nested></tag>";
String formattedXml = new [UnknownClass]().format(unformattedXml);

Note: My input is a String. My output is a String.

Answer 1

Transformer transformer = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
//initialize StreamResult with File object to save to file
StreamResult result = new StreamResult(new StringWriter());
DOMSource source = new DOMSource(doc);
transformer.transform(source, result);
String xmlString = result.getWriter().toString();
System.out.println(xmlString);

note: results may vary depending on the java version, search for workarounds specific to your platform

Answer 2

Since you are starting with a String, you need to covert to a DOM object (e.g. Node) before you can use the Transformer. However, if you know your XML string is valid, and you don't want to incur the memory overhead of parsing a string into a DOM, then running a transform over the DOM to get a string back - you could just do some old fashioned character by character parsing. Insert a newline and spaces after every </...> characters, keep and indent counter (to determine the number of spaces) that you increment for every <...> and decrement for every </...> you see.

Disclaimer - I did a cut/paste/text edit of the functions below, so they may not compile as is.

public static final Element createDOM(String strXML) 
    throws ParserConfigurationException, SAXException, IOException {

    DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
    dbf.setValidating(true);
    DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
    InputSource sourceXML = new InputSource(new StringReader(strXML))
    Document xmlDoc = db.parse(sourceXML);
    Element e = xmlDoc.getDocumentElement();
    e.normalize();
    return e;
}

public static final void prettyPrint(Node xml, OutputStream out)
    throws TransformerConfigurationException, TransformerFactoryConfigurationError, TransformerException {
    Transformer tf = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
    tf.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.OMIT_XML_DECLARATION, "yes");
    tf.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.ENCODING, "UTF-8");
    tf.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
    tf.transform(new DOMSource(xml), new StreamResult(out));
}

Answer 3

Check out JTidy..

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jtidy

Answer 4

Here's an answer to my own question. I combined the answers from the various results to write a class that pretty prints XML.

No guarantees on how it responds with invalid XML or large documents.

package ecb.sdw.pretty;

import org.apache.xml.serialize.OutputFormat;
import org.apache.xml.serialize.XMLSerializer;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.xml.sax.InputSource;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;

import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.StringReader;
import java.io.StringWriter;
import java.io.Writer;

/**
 * Pretty-prints xml, supplied as a string.
 * <p/>
 * eg.
 * <code>
 * String formattedXml = new XmlFormatter().format("<tag><nested>hello</nested></tag>");
 * </code>
 */
public class XmlFormatter {

    public XmlFormatter() {
    }

    public String format(String unformattedXml) {
        try {
            final Document document = parseXmlFile(unformattedXml);

            OutputFormat format = new OutputFormat(document);
            format.setLineWidth(65);
            format.setIndenting(true);
            format.setIndent(2);
            Writer out = new StringWriter();
            XMLSerializer serializer = new XMLSerializer(out, format);
            serializer.serialize(document);

            return out.toString();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }
    }

    private Document parseXmlFile(String in) {
        try {
            DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
            DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
            InputSource is = new InputSource(new StringReader(in));
            return db.parse(is);
        } catch (ParserConfigurationException e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        } catch (SAXException e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        } catch (IOException e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String unformattedXml =
                "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?><QueryMessage\n" +
                        "        xmlns=\"http://www.SDMX.org/resources/SDMXML/schemas/v2_0/message\"\n" +
                        "        xmlns:query=\"http://www.SDMX.org/resources/SDMXML/schemas/v2_0/query\"&gt;\n" +
                        "    <Query>\n" +
                        "        <query:CategorySchemeWhere>\n" +
                        "   \t\t\t\t\t         <query:AgencyID>ECB\n\n\n\n</query:AgencyID>\n" +
                        "        </query:CategorySchemeWhere>\n" +
                        "    </Query>\n\n\n\n\n" +
                        "</QueryMessage>";

        System.out.println(new XmlFormatter().format(unformattedXml));
    }

}

Answer 5

there is a very nice command line xml utility called xmlstarlet(http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/) that can do a lot of things which a lot of people use.

Your could execute this program programatically using Runtime.exec and then readin the formatted output file. It has more options and better error reporting than a few lines of Java code can provide.

download xmlstarlet : http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=66612&package_id=64589

Answer 6

XMLBeans can do a lot of fun things with your XML as well. :)

Answer 7

I've pretty printed in the past using the org.dom4j.io.OutputFormat.createPrettyPrint() method

public String prettyPrint(final String xml){  

    if (StringUtils.isBlank(xml)) {
        throw new RuntimeException("xml was null or blank in prettyPrint()");
    }

    final StringWriter sw;

    try {
        final OutputFormat format = OutputFormat.createPrettyPrint();
        final org.dom4j.Document document = DocumentHelper.parseText(xml);
        sw = new StringWriter();
        final XMLWriter writer = new XMLWriter(sw, format);
        writer.write(document);
    }
    catch (Exception e) {
        throw new RuntimeException("Error pretty printing xml:\n" + xml, e);
    }
    return sw.toString();
}

Answer 8

Regarding comment that "you must first build a DOM tree": No, you need not and should not do that.

Instead, create a StreamSource (new StreamSource(new StringReader(str)), and feed that to the identity transformer mentioned. That'll use SAX parser, and result will be much faster. Building an intermediate tree is pure overhead for this case. Otherwise the top-ranked answer is good.

Answer 9

If using a 3rd party XML library is ok, you can get away with something significantly simpler than what the currently highest-voted answers suggest.

It was stated that both input and output should be Strings, so here's a utility method that does just that, implemented with the XOM library:

import nu.xom.*;
import java.io.*;

[...]

public static String format(String xml) throws ParsingException, IOException {
    ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
    Serializer serializer = new Serializer(out);
    serializer.setIndent(4);  // or whatever you like
    serializer.write(new Builder().build(xml, ""));
    return out.toString("UTF-8");
}

I tested that it works, and the results do not depend on your JRE version or anything like that. To see how to customise the output format to your liking, take a look at the Serializer API.

This actually came out longer than I thought - some extra lines were needed because Serializer wants an OutputStream to write to. But note that there's very little code for actual XML twiddling here.

(This answer is part of my evaluation of XOM, which was suggested as one option in my question about the best Java XML library to replace dom4j. For the record, with dom4j you could achieve this with similar ease using XMLWriter and OutputFormat. Edit: ...as demonstrated in mlo55's answer.)

Answer 10

a simpler solution based on this answer:

public static String prettyFormat(String input, int indent) {
    try {
        Source xmlInput = new StreamSource(new StringReader(input));
        StringWriter stringWriter = new StringWriter();
        StreamResult xmlOutput = new StreamResult(stringWriter);
        Transformer transformer = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer(); 
        transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
        transformer.setOutputProperty("{http://xml.apache.org/xslt}indent-amount", String.valueOf(indent));
        transformer.transform(xmlInput, xmlOutput);
        return xmlOutput.getWriter().toString();
    } catch (Exception e) {
        throw new RuntimeException(e); // simple exception handling, please review it
    }
}

public static String prettyFormat(String input) {
    return prettyFormat(input, 2);
}

testcase:

prettyFormat("<root><child>aaa</child><child/></root>");

returns:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<root>
  <child>aaa</child>
  <child/>
</root>

Answer 11

Hmmm... faced something like this and it is a known bug ... just add this OutputProperty ..

transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputPropertiesFactory.S_KEY_INDENT_AMOUNT, "8");

Hope this helps ...

Answer 12

Here's a way of doing it using dom4j:

Imports:

import org.dom4j.Document;
import org.dom4j.DocumentHelper;
import org.dom4j.io.OutputFormat;
import org.dom4j.io.XMLWriter;

Code:

String xml = "<your xml='here'/>";
Document doc = DocumentHelper.parseText(xml);
StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
OutputFormat format = OutputFormat.createPrettyPrint();
XMLWriter xw = new XMLWriter(sw, format);
xw.write(doc);
String result = sw.toString();

Answer 13

Kevin Hakanson said: "However, if you know your XML string is valid, and you don't want to incur the memory overhead of parsing a string into a DOM, then running a transform over the DOM to get a string back - you could just do some old fashioned character by character parsing. Insert a newline and spaces after every characters, keep and indent counter (to determine the number of spaces) that you increment for every <...> and decrement for every you see."

Agreed. Such an approach is much faster and has far fewer dependencies.

Example solution:

/**
 * XML utils, including formatting.
 */
public class XmlUtils
{
  private static XmlFormatter formatter = new XmlFormatter(2, 80);

  public static String formatXml(String s)
  {
    return formatter.format(s, 0);
  }

  public static String formatXml(String s, int initialIndent)
  {
    return formatter.format(s, initialIndent);
  }

  private static class XmlFormatter
  {
    private int indentNumChars;
    private int lineLength;
    private boolean singleLine;

    public XmlFormatter(int indentNumChars, int lineLength)
    {
      this.indentNumChars = indentNumChars;
      this.lineLength = lineLength;
    }

    public synchronized String format(String s, int initialIndent)
    {
      int indent = initialIndent;
      StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
      for (int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++)
      {
        char currentChar = s.charAt(i);
        if (currentChar == '<')
        {
          char nextChar = s.charAt(i + 1);
          if (nextChar == '/')
            indent -= indentNumChars;
          if (!singleLine)   // Don't indent before closing element if we're creating opening and closing elements on a single line.
            sb.append(buildWhitespace(indent));
          if (nextChar != '?' && nextChar != '!' && nextChar != '/')
            indent += indentNumChars;
          singleLine = false;  // Reset flag.
        }
        sb.append(currentChar);
        if (currentChar == '>')
        {
          if (s.charAt(i - 1) == '/')
          {
            indent -= indentNumChars;
            sb.append("\n");
          }
          else
          {
            int nextStartElementPos = s.indexOf('<', i);
            if (nextStartElementPos > i + 1)
            {
              String textBetweenElements = s.substring(i + 1, nextStartElementPos);

              // If the space between elements is solely newlines, let them through to preserve additional newlines in source document.
              if (textBetweenElements.replaceAll("\n", "").length() == 0)
              {
                sb.append(textBetweenElements + "\n");
              }
              // Put tags and text on a single line if the text is short.
              else if (textBetweenElements.length() <= lineLength * 0.5)
              {
                sb.append(textBetweenElements);
                singleLine = true;
              }
              // For larger amounts of text, wrap lines to a maximum line length.
              else
              {
                sb.append("\n" + lineWrap(textBetweenElements, lineLength, indent, null) + "\n");
              }
              i = nextStartElementPos - 1;
            }
            else
            {
              sb.append("\n");
            }
          }
        }
      }
      return sb.toString();
    }
  }

  private static String buildWhitespace(int numChars)
  {
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    for (int i = 0; i < numChars; i++)
      sb.append(" ");
    return sb.toString();
  }

  /**
   * Wraps the supplied text to the specified line length.
   * @lineLength the maximum length of each line in the returned string (not including indent if specified).
   * @indent optional number of whitespace characters to prepend to each line before the text.
   * @linePrefix optional string to append to the indent (before the text).
   * @returns the supplied text wrapped so that no line exceeds the specified line length + indent, optionally with
   * indent and prefix applied to each line.
   */
  private static String lineWrap(String s, int lineLength, Integer indent, String linePrefix)
  {
    if (s == null)
      return null;

    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    int lineStartPos = 0;
    int lineEndPos;
    boolean firstLine = true;
    while(lineStartPos < s.length())
    {
      if (!firstLine)
        sb.append("\n");
      else
        firstLine = false;

      if (lineStartPos + lineLength > s.length())
        lineEndPos = s.length() - 1;
      else
      {
        lineEndPos = lineStartPos + lineLength - 1;
        while (lineEndPos > lineStartPos && (s.charAt(lineEndPos) != ' ' && s.charAt(lineEndPos) != '\t'))
          lineEndPos--;
      }
      sb.append(buildWhitespace(indent));
      if (linePrefix != null)
        sb.append(linePrefix);

      sb.append(s.substring(lineStartPos, lineEndPos + 1));
      lineStartPos = lineEndPos + 1;
    }
    return sb.toString();
  }

  // other utils removed for brevity
}

Answer 14

I had the same problem and I'm having great success with JTidy (http://jtidy.sourceforge.net/index.html)

Example:

Tidy t = new Tidy();
t.setIndentContent(true);
Document d = t.parseDOM(
    new ByteArrayInputStream("HTML goes here", null);

OutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
t.pprint(d, out);
String html = out.toString();